Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money. "

Related Quotes:

" Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them. "

" I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community. "

" I'm the kid in school who always, you know, got the straight A's. I got to be that, you know, alpha aggressive work-ethic guy. And to have people assume that I was just this blithe, in-your-face guy writing crap, tossing it off, garnering insane amounts of money, and laughing all the way to the bank - frankly, I guess I got sensitive. "

" You have to keep surprising your audience. "

" I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story. "

" 'Nice Guys' has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it's heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth. "

" I've read a thousand private-eye novels. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters. "

" 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. "

" I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made. "

" Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work. "

" One of my favorite L.A. movies is 'Ed Wood,' and it's about how Bela Lugosi went from being this movie star personality to living in a little bungalow with his cats in the valley where, if you walked by, you'd have no idea. He'd come out and get his paper, and you'd go, 'That guy looks familiar.' "

" I just want to write movies. And I try very hard. "

" I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks. "

" Writers are nerds. "

" 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. "

" For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles. "

" Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie. "

" 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. "

" Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind. "

" I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market. "

" The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there'd always be beats where I'd go, 'Oh... well, that's skilful, in a way, but it doesn't get the flavour I'd intended in the script.' "

" Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. "

" What strikes me as memorable about 'Predator' was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic. "

" 'Iron Man 3' was very educational. There's a train that starts moving which already has so many moving parts, and it's a constant process of animatics and storyboards and consulting meetings, and it's a very mechanical process once the script is written. It's sprawling, and they're throwing money at it to get these things accomplished. "