Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" You have to keep surprising your audience. "
Shane Black
You
Audience
Your
Related Quotes:
" 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
Happy
Honesty
" 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. "
Shane Black
Everything
You
Think
" 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. "
Shane Black
Feel
Like
Movies
" '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. "
Shane Black
Nice
Odd
You
" Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind. "
Shane Black
Back
Looking Back
Wind
" 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. "
Shane Black
Literature
Together
Slow
" The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters. "
Shane Black
Always
Interesting
Great
" I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money. "
Shane Black
Me
Money
Some
" 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
Win
You
Way
" I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks. "
Shane Black
Think
Take
Superhero
" 'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market. "
Shane Black
Young
Different
Very
" 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. "
Shane Black
Flow
Edgy
Film
" 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. "
Shane Black
Feel
You
Think
" 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. "
Shane Black
Money
Writing
People
" 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. "
Shane Black
Think
You
Action
" 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. "
Shane Black
Door
Money
Ideas
" I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made. "
Shane Black
Hate
Worst
Professional
" 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. "
Shane Black
Love
Find
Hero
" '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. "
Shane Black
Man
Meetings
Money
" Probably my favorite piece of music, as an album taken as a whole, is Bruce Springsteen's 'Greetings from Asbury Park.' I just think it's incredibly pure. It's a sound that sort of broke new ground, and I think it paved the way for a hundred people that sound very similar. "
Shane Black
Sound
Way
Music
" Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. "
Shane Black
Writing
Scripts
Pain
" Writing is tough. It's insanely obsessive work. "
Shane Black
Writing
Obsessive
Work
" What strikes me as memorable about 'Predator' was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic. "
Shane Black
Iconic
Decisions
Memorable
" Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie. "
Shane Black
Target
Fires
Bullets
" I've read a thousand private-eye novels. "
Shane Black
Read
Novels
Thousand
" 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
" 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. "
Shane Black
Film
Action
Boring
" 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.' "
Shane Black
Reason
Way
Always
" 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. "
Shane Black
Work
You
Writing
" 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. "
Shane Black
Detective
Level
Literature