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.

Christopher McQuarrie

Categorized in : Watches Giving Marketing

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

Christopher McQuarrie

novelists writing years

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

Christopher McQuarrie

hollywood dog

My films do very well on home video.

Christopher McQuarrie

video film home

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

shooting film thinking

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

Christopher McQuarrie

writing watches way

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

adaptation crime media

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

too-much writing way

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."

Christopher McQuarrie

want stuff giving

Action to me is something very fun to shoot.

Christopher McQuarrie

action fun

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

Christopher McQuarrie

mind writing boys

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

Christopher McQuarrie

deliverance different watches

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

sake evil ideas

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

Christopher McQuarrie

honest ifs people

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

existence design challenges

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

groups focus worry

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.

Christopher McQuarrie

speech sound thinking

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

Christopher McQuarrie

environment perfect action long

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

you i-believe character believe

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

never great mind work

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

Christopher McQuarrie

pretty you film boring