When you only have $15 million, you have to talk about something interesting. You can't just cut to a helicopter exploding.

Directing comes closer than anything I’ve found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.

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.

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 don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it. It's like, "Put on some makeup, make me look good. Okay, now I'm going to roll my shoulder." Part of me still feels like, "Wow, that's weird for a man to do."

The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.

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

It was like a frat house for film geeks, the Pad O' Guys. That's what being at UCLA afforded me. So when one of us had some success - in this case, my pal Fred Dekker - he would reach down the ladder and help me up a rung, give my work to his agent to pass around to see if anyone liked it.