Normally in spy movies, the person that the hero deals with is at the centre of power, surrounded by video screens, and they’re old and grizzled. I’m no stranger to that dynamic.
‘XIII’ is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to ‘The Bourne Identity.’ I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn’t be published in English.
I don’t know why there hasn’t been a ‘Spy Kids’ cartoon. You have to bring that up to Robert Rodriguez and see what he has to say. That would be an interesting thing to do with this series.
Fundamentalists are crazy. They’re the real world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don’t believe in that, if you can’t relate to that, it just seems crazy.
If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America’s spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what’s now the CIA.
However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it.
The cool thing about ‘Spy Kids 3D: Game Over’ was that Robert Rodriguez brought back 3D. I feel like he did with that film. Now, every film is 3D.
Coming out of ‘Spy Kids,’ I immediately wanted to do more grown-up roles, and I was turning down a lot of the kind of younger, cheesier roles.
I had no ambition to be a football coach. I wanted to be a spy for MI5 or MI6.
You just have to look at me to know what I am feeling. So I would be a useless policewoman or spy.
The Spy Act strikes a right balance between preserving legitimate and benign uses of this technology, while still, at the same time, protecting unwitting consumers from the harm caused when it is misused and, of course, designed for nefarious purposes.
My favorite movies are the ones that are different the second time, or where you’re constantly discovering new things. It’s not just genre movies, either, and it’s not just about twists. I saw ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ four times in the theater before I realized it’s a love story. I love that.
I invented the historical spy novel.
‘Atomic Blonde’ is about the characters’ bigger existential crisis and their world. It’s not so much the conceit of the spy game; it’s more that being a spy sucks. But we’re going to make it fun to watch.
I love ‘Bond’ movies, I love spy movies.
Alan Cumming was such a fun guy to watch. I remember he has a song in the first ‘Spy Kids’ movie, and when Danny Elfman came to set, they were working on the song.
Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, ‘conscience,’ watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a ‘matter of conscience,’ i.e. police business.
You’re not supposed to stop and listen and spy on people practicing. It’s supposed to be a private thing. But it’s when you come face-to-face with yourself and you look for your flaws and you try to fix them yourself, it’s a really intimidating process. It can be very discouraging.
I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as ‘forbidden knowledge:’ methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.
Glass is the world’s worst spy camera. If you want to surreptitiously take photos, I would not use Glass.
The Underground Railroad was a spy network for the North and that story has never been told.
The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they’re actually going.
From the Fourth Amendment to post-Watergate reforms to the national outcry when Bush’s warrantless surveillance was revealed in 2005, the United States has a strong tradition of overseeing the government’s power to spy on its citizens.
I have a whole section of a filing cabinet in my office full of ideas. Some are ideas for books or articles I want to write. One is a romantic comedy; one’s about my dad’s life. I’ve also got ideas for books on moral relativism as well as democracy and human nature. There’s also a really cool concept for a spy novel.
That’s when it really came together for me that I was in a Bond film, to have my own spy car!
Being a filmmaker is kind of like being a glorified spy.
My dad was this Jack-of-all-trades, entrepreneur type. I secretly think he may be a spy, when I really think about it and I kind of connect the pieces. That’s what led us to moving to Japan when I was four.
You can’t be a real spy and have everybody in the world know who you are and what your drink is. That’s just hysterically funny.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
I try to make a really good spy movie, so the animation has to be good. ‘Bot Seeks Bot’ was one of my lighter and more playful ones, so it can survive not being visually told as well. I did have some issues with the quality of the inking on some of the animation, but a lot of that will only ever bother me.
War stories, westerns, spy stories are all accepted as respectable because they are read by men. It is only women’s light reading which is derided.
Napoleon might have understood Dwight D. Eisenhower, who fought not even a hundred and fifty years after Waterloo. But I don’t think Eisenhower could even begin to wrap his mind around drone warfare, spy satellites, or any of the technology that now defines the security of our world.
I’ve always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I’d have a spy story, a space story and a football story.
I was never a spy. I was with the OSS organization. We had a number of women, but we were all office help.
I don’t expect people who’ve enjoyed ‘Spy Kids’ will enjoy ‘Repo! the Genetic Opera!’
I give my grandfather, Dr Harold Young, a forestry Professor at the University of Maine, full credit for my career path. He pioneered the use of aerial photography in forestry in the 1950s, and we think he worked as a spy for the CIA during the Cold War, mapping Russian installations.
People on ‘The Incredibles’ would ask me if I listened to a lot of spy scores, but no, I don’t.
I wrote ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ at the age of 30 under intense, unshared personal stress and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself.
Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and ‘Our Man in Havana’ may be his best.
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.
Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany’s is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency.
On ‘The Spy Who Dumped Me,’ it wasn’t fear as much as it was feeling overwhelmed because there were so many moving parts. But I felt that I knew what I was doing. And on a movie like this, there’s so much preparation that goes into it that by the time you were there, you had done months of planning.
The merit of ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,’ then – or its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.
I’ve been a spy for almost all of my adult life – I don’t like being in the spotlight.
I always wanted to play characters, and that was definitely one – a Russian spy.
Driving a car is no longer about zooming down clear lanes, the joy and freedom of the road flowing through your hair like a fine westerly breeze. It’s about solid traffic, petrol fumes, spy cameras, eco-guilt, and simultaneous social media.
If I could rub a genie and anything could happen? Truthfully, my other love, and this is a complete 180, but I’d love to do a spy or an espionage pic, like a James Bond movie.
Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.
Because I’m not a spy in ‘Spooks’ and I’m not in every day I’m able to do other things, which is great fun because it breaks it all up for me and I get some time to spend with my daughter.
The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn’t do all that much collection of intelligence. It’s not a very good spy agency, but it’s good at running covert action.
I want to play a fireman and a spy. I want to learn special effects.
