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.

I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession.

I hate 'The Professional.' It's one of the worst action/adventure movies ever made.

I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.

Sometimes I'll have a scene that strikes me, I just feel like writing a scene, a mini-story that seems like it might lead somewhere. But that is such a tentative, fishing-hook way to go about it that these days I've found it's easier to kind of at least have your concept and start attaching things to a skeleton. So I try to find the armature, the kind of backbone of it first that you can start to hang those scenes on.

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.

When you are making a lot of money people forget you are trying to be creative and they picture you laughing all the way to the bank ... especially with an action script, automatically it gets boo-hooed as being worthless. It was very difficult to hear that sort of thing and I lost a good many friends over money issues because they didn't have money or their scripts weren't selling and mine were.