Christopher McQuarrie Quotes

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've looked at all of Hitler's speeches thinking that there's gotta be one where he's 'I'm Hitler!', but there weren't any. His speeches were all about hope and prosperity - he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity. Hitler speeches that makes him sound like a villain are pretty hard to find, he was very detached from what he was doing, he kept himself compartmentalised from it.

You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

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.

Action to me is something very fun to shoot.

I used to be a die-hard defender of physical film, which I still am. I love shooting on physical film and I think it's great.

Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

The biggest challenge is not coming up with the stunt, the biggest challenge is designing a sequence around it that sort of justifies its existence.

My films do very well on home video.

If you're surrounded by good people and you're really honest with yourself, you'll be delivered.

I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."