I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.
— Tony Gilroy
No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.
Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.
Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.
I wanted to try before I got too old to try to do a big movie and I'd been looking for something to do that was interesting enough to spend those two years of my life on.
I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.
Once a film costs a certain amount of money, things have to round off.
If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.
Corporations are like countries now, there's a king, there are serfs, there's a court, basically everything but moats. They're feudal societies, and there are good ones and bad ones.
When I start something, I know people I am working with, it's a project they're interested in.
I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.
I worked for a lot of directors.
I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.
I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.
The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.
The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.
The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.
I've never taken a job on anything I didn't want to do.
I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.
I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.
I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?
Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.
I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.
You can't teach someone to be imaginative.
A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.
You change or you hide your head in the sand.
The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.
I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I'm supposed to.
I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.
Different people work different ways.
Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.
I prefer writing originals.
I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.
I used to be, when I was young, I used to be extremely regular and very organized.
