Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie.

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.

It sometimes is better to write in a more directed, focused way when the pages are aimed at something already, a mission statement or a basic spine that represents the theme or the concept that you've agreed on, and writing partners are great for that because you can sit there until you get it.

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

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.

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.

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.