You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.
— Christopher McQuarrie
History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.
The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.
The truth of the matter is movies are a reflection of life and violence is a real part of life. I don't think you could make movies exclusively where there was no violence.
Ideally, I'd like to have a movie that people like and makes money.
I am not interested in telling you what to think. My job is to show you what I think. Period.
Look: the day I've made a movie that I think is really good, I hope I say it out loud so somebody can say, 'Then you probably made the worst movie of your entire career.'
When you're making a film, you don't really have time to consider what the whole of your film is. And then, when you're releasing your film and promoting your film, you're looking at it in a different way. Then, as you move away from it, you start to look at it objectively and think, 'What could I have done better?'
I'm saying, let's learn to reacquire a respect for the power of guns. This culture is so indifferent and disrespectful of guns that we should be terrified.
What makes a movie now is a package, a brand, a remake or some preexisting material.
I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously.
Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.
Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.
I love traveling around promoting different movies because I'm always looking at different places, and I always walk around to see the city.
'The Way of the Gun' I wrote in five days.
I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.
My films do very well on home video.
Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.
To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
With 'Rubicon,' Mark Long and Dan Capel have created the perfect environment for an intense action franchise.
The one thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that no studio has ever told me to tone down violence. They only ask you to make it more presentable.
Scripts don't get movies made.
When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.
Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.
While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.
Action to me is something very fun to shoot.
I'm a big fan of the movies of the '60s, more than a fan of the movies of the '70s.
I always feel like an outsider. I'll always feel like the nerd at the party.
Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.
The way I like to describe Hollywood today is this: everyone wants to make 'Deliverance,' but no one wants to be Ned Beatty.
A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.
There is no 'Top Gun 2' in which Maverick is not the starring role.
For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.
I've always been fascinated with Navy SEALs in general and their role in Afghanistan in particular.
I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.
I honestly never wanted to direct. It was only when I started to work on 'Alexander the Great' that I realized I had to direct. I saw something so specifically in my mind, I could not leave it to someone else.
