Tony Gilroy
Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.Collection: Intelligence
I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.
I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?
I worked for a lot of directors.
I used to be, when I was young, I used to be extremely regular and very organized.
I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.
I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.
Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.
When I start something, I know people I am working with, it's a project they're interested in.
I prefer writing originals.
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.
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.
If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.
Different people work different ways.
I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.
Once a film costs a certain amount of money, things have to round off.
I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.
I've never taken a job on anything I didn't want to do.
I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.
I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I'm supposed to.
The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.
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.
The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.
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.
Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.
You change or you hide your head in the sand.
The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.
Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.
A reversal is just anything that's a surprise. It's a way of keeping the audience interested.
I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.
No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.
You can't teach someone to be imaginative.
I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.
I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.
You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.Collection: Writing
No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.Collection: Writing
What you need to know to direct a movie is [of] such great variety. I've worked with people who were maestros, who know everything. I've worked with people who were empty and lost, who had no clue what they were doing. You wouldn't hire them to paint your apartment. And then there's everything in-between. There's no list of skills you have to have to sit in that chair.Collection: Skills
You just try to find something that interests you, and particular something that interests you that's gonna consume you the way that these big movies just really eat you up.Collection: Trying