Top 30 Shane Black Quotes

You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.

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.

What strikes me as memorable about ‘Predator’ was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic.

Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.

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.

For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the ’80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the ’70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the ’70s. Back then, you didn’t have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers.

Writers are nerds.

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.

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 would say ‘The Chill’ by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts – but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.

I think, in big-budget movies where everything seems so poured over and restricted and the studio wants to examine every frame to make sure it’s vetted properly, you lose a little bit of playfulness.

Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things – those are intellectual concepts, and they’re always so subject to shifts in the wind.

I’ve read a thousand private-eye novels.

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.

I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don’t work at all, but I’ll watch them if they’re on. Like ‘The Game.’

I just want to write movies. And I try very hard.

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

I love the notion of the feckless sort of knight in tarnished armor who would love to fill the shoes of the legendary hero but just can’t. And then find a moment when they do. And I love the idea that there’s a myth waiting for each of us to occupy.

Probably my favorite piece of music, as an album taken as a whole, is Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Greetings from Asbury Park.’ I just think it’s incredibly pure. It’s a sound that sort of broke new ground, and I think it paved the way for a hundred people that sound very similar.

I’m cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community.

‘Nice Guys’ has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it’s heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth.

Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they’re doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, ‘Give us some pages,’ he just goes off and comes back. It’s just pages, and suddenly, there’s some writing on them.

I think it’s very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

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

I’ve turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money.

Whatever film I’m making, no matter how harsh or edgy it is, there has to be a core underneath the ebb and flow of it that is heartfelt.

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

I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.

The reason I took on directing a film myself was because, no matter how skilful a director was or how much I liked the film, there’d always be beats where I’d go, ‘Oh… well, that’s skilful, in a way, but it doesn’t get the flavour I’d intended in the script.’