Top 42 Christopher McQuarrie Quotes
#1. For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.
Christopher McQuarrie
#2. I honestly never wanted to direct. It was only when I started to work on 'Alexander the Great' that I realized I had to direct. I saw something so specifically in my mind, I could not leave it to someone else.
Christopher McQuarrie
#3. History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.
Christopher McQuarrie
#4. Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
Christopher McQuarrie
#5. A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.
Christopher McQuarrie
#6. To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
Christopher McQuarrie
#7. You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.
Christopher McQuarrie
#8. The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.
Christopher McQuarrie
#9. Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.
Christopher McQuarrie
#10. What makes a movie now is a package, a brand, a remake or some preexisting material.
Christopher McQuarrie
#11. Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.
Christopher McQuarrie
#12. The one thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that no studio has ever told me to tone down violence. They only ask you to make it more presentable.
Christopher McQuarrie
#13. I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously.
Christopher McQuarrie
#15. I'm a big fan of the movies of the '60s, more than a fan of the movies of the '70s.
Christopher McQuarrie
#17. I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.
Christopher McQuarrie
#18. When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.
Christopher McQuarrie
#19. I'm saying, let's learn to reacquire a respect for the power of guns. This culture is so indifferent and disrespectful of guns that we should be terrified.
Christopher McQuarrie
#20. The way I like to describe Hollywood today is this: everyone wants to make 'Deliverance,' but no one wants to be Ned Beatty.
Christopher McQuarrie
#21. The biggest challenge is not coming up with the stunt, the biggest challenge is designing a sequence around it that sort of justifies its existence.
Christopher McQuarrie
#23. The truth of the matter is movies are a reflection of life and violence is a real part of life. I don't think you could make movies exclusively where there was no violence.
Christopher McQuarrie
#24. Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.
Christopher McQuarrie
#26. I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.
Christopher McQuarrie
#27. I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.
Christopher McQuarrie
#28. Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.
Christopher McQuarrie
#30. I love traveling around promoting different movies because I'm always looking at different places, and I always walk around to see the city.
Christopher McQuarrie
#32. Look: the day I've made a movie that I think is really good, I hope I say it out loud so somebody can say, 'Then you probably made the worst movie of your entire career.'
Christopher McQuarrie
#33. If you're surrounded by good people and you're really honest with yourself, you'll be delivered.
Christopher McQuarrie
#34. I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.
Christopher McQuarrie
#36. I've always been fascinated with Navy SEALs in general and their role in Afghanistan in particular.
Christopher McQuarrie
#37. While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
Christopher McQuarrie
#38. I am not interested in telling you what to think. My job is to show you what I think. Period.
Christopher McQuarrie
#39. I used to be a die-hard defender of physical film, which I still am. I love shooting on physical film and I think it's great.
Christopher McQuarrie
#40. When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.
Christopher McQuarrie
#42. With 'Rubicon,' Mark Long and Dan Capel have created the perfect environment for an intense action franchise.
Christopher McQuarrie
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