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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. "
Shane Black
Mind
Money
People
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" You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor. "
Shane Black
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" Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work. "
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" I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community. "
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" I just want to write movies. And I try very hard. "
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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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" Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie. "
Shane Black
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" I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money. "
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" 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. "
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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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" Writers are nerds. "
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" I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made. "
Shane Black
Hate
Worst
Professional
" 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. "
Shane Black
Action
Beginning
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" Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. "
Shane Black
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" You have to keep surprising your audience. "
Shane Black
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Your
" 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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Find
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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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" I try not to think about anybody's reaction to what I do. "
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Try
" I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit. "
Shane Black
Villain
Wear
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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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" 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. "
Shane Black
Powerful
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Honesty
" Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind. "
Shane Black
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" An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience. "
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" '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. "
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Man
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" '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. "
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Nice
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" I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature. "
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" 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.' "
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" An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring. "
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Action
Boring
" I've read a thousand private-eye novels. "
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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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" 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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