Top 30 Tony Gilroy Quotes

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I’m trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there’s a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

Corporations are like countries now, there’s a king, there are serfs, there’s a court, basically everything but moats. They’re feudal societies, and there are good ones and bad ones.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.

You change or you hide your head in the sand.

I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I’m writing in the beginning and sketching.

I can’t imagine directing from someone else’s script.

I like emotions, but I really don’t like sentimentality, and I don’t like when things break their spell.

I’ve never taken a job on anything I didn’t want to do.

I prefer writing originals.

You can’t teach someone to be imaginative.

I used to be, when I was young, I used to be extremely regular and very organized.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I’m supposed to.

When I start something, I know people I am working with, it’s a project they’re interested in.

I wanted to try before I got too old to try to do a big movie and I’d been looking for something to do that was interesting enough to spend those two years of my life on.

I don’t remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.

Different people work different ways.

I think what I’ve recognized over the years is that I’m very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.

I don’t like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.

I worked for a lot of directors.

Fear changes everything. We’re animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I’m not exempt from that.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.