Christopher McQuarrie Quotations

When you've written a film and directed it and it comes out exactly as you imagined it, it's pretty boring.

What makes a movie now is a package, a brand, a remake or some preexisting material.

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.'

Ideally, I'd like to have a movie that people like and makes money.

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.

I always feel like an outsider. I'll always feel like the nerd at the party.

Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.

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.

When you're making a film, you don't really have time to consider what the whole of your film is. And then, when you're releasing your film and promoting your film, you're looking at it in a different way. Then, as you move away from it, you start to look at it objectively and think, 'What could I have done better?'

I've looked at all of Hitler's speeches thinking that there's gotta be one where he's 'I'm Hitler!', but there weren't any. His speeches were all about hope and prosperity - he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity. Hitler speeches that makes him sound like a villain are pretty hard to find, he was very detached from what he was doing, he kept himself compartmentalised from it.

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.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."

You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.

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.

I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

Action to me is something very fun to shoot.

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.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

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. Theres even reverence to a screenplay.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

If you're surrounded by good people and you're really honest with yourself, you'll be delivered.

My films do very well on home video.

Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

With 'Rubicon,' Mark Long and Dan Capel have created the perfect environment for an intense action franchise.

'The Way of the Gun' I wrote in five days.

The way I like to describe Hollywood today is this: everyone wants to make 'Deliverance,' but no one wants to be Ned Beatty.

I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously.

I've always been fascinated with Navy SEALs in general and their role in Afghanistan in particular.

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.

A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.

There is no 'Top Gun 2' in which Maverick is not the starring role.

For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away. They always have to pay for the story.

Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.

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.

I'm a big fan of the movies of the '60s, more than a fan of the movies of the '70s.

I love traveling around promoting different movies because I'm always looking at different places, and I always walk around to see the city.

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.

I love films like 'Deliverance' where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

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.

I am not interested in telling you what to think. My job is to show you what I think. Period.

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.

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.

The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.