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" I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community. "
Shane Black
Community
Cynical
Hollywood
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" I think, in big-budget movies where everything seems so poured over and restricted and the studio wants to examine every frame to make sure it's vetted properly, you lose a little bit of playfulness. "
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" Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work. "
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" You have to keep surprising your audience. "
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" I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks. "
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" Writers are nerds. "
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" I just want to write movies. And I try very hard. "
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" If someone fires a gun in a movie, it should always be a big deal. I don't like movies where someone shoots at someone else but they just run away and manage to dodge the bullet. Or people are all firing at each other continuously for 10 minutes. "
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" Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind. "
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" For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the '80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the '70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the '70s. Back then, you didn't have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers. "
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" 'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market. "
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" Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. "
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" No one cares about your ideas. They're not going to come knocking on your door looking for ideas. They're going to want some concrete evidence that you have the potential to serve them or give them value for money. So that's my advice: write your spec scripts, no matter what. They're essential as a calling card, even if they don't get produced. "
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" Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie. "
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" I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it. "
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" I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it. "
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" I love the notion of the feckless sort of knight in tarnished armor who would love to fill the shoes of the legendary hero but just can't. And then find a moment when they do. And I love the idea that there's a myth waiting for each of us to occupy. "
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" I'll say, what makes me happy about making movies is, every once in a while through movies we find a kind of honesty. There's an honesty in fiction that's as effective or even more powerful than the honesty of our lives. We can find something that's genuinely true, like a chemistry between people or a statement that speaks to an audience. "
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" Whatever film I'm making, no matter how harsh or edgy it is, there has to be a core underneath the ebb and flow of it that is heartfelt. "
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" I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No. "
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" I always have humour in my action movies. I think characters that make jokes under fire are more real. It somehow helps put you in their shoes. "
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" I'm ashamed to say this, but I watched every episode of 'Starsky and Hutch' as a kid. I loved that show, but now I think it's stupid - they'd have a car chase for no reason, then Paul Michael Glaser would shoot the car and it would blow up. "
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" Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind. "
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" I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game.' "
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" I try not to think about anybody's reaction to what I do. "
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" I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made. "
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" I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit. "
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" I go back to read 'Tarzan' books every now and again or 'John Carter,' and you realize Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a great writer by any means. But he was a great storyteller. You wanted to see what happened next. "
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" The worst of the action films are the ones where everything is one shout from beginning to finish. And there's no differentiation between beats, like small or big, or quiet or expansive. It's all just one loud shout. "
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" I've read a thousand private-eye novels. "
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" For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles. "
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