Explore Quotes by Shane Black

I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.

Probably my favorite piece of music, as an album taken as a whole, is Bruce Springsteen's 'Greetings from Asbury Park.' I just think it's incredibly pure. It's a sound that sort of broke new ground, and I think it paved the way for a hundred people that sound very similar.

Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind.

Any time anyone fires bullets in an action movie that don't hit the target it immediately undermines the movie.

I'm ashamed to say this, but I watched every episode of 'Starsky and Hutch' as a kid. I loved that show, but now I think it's stupid - they'd have a car chase for no reason, then Paul Michael Glaser would shoot the car and it would blow up.

An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring.

I love the notion of the feckless sort of knight in tarnished armor who would love to fill the shoes of the legendary hero but just can't. And then find a moment when they do. And I love the idea that there's a myth waiting for each of us to occupy.

No one cares about your ideas. They're not going to come knocking on your door looking for ideas. They're going to want some concrete evidence that you have the potential to serve them or give them value for money. So that's my advice: write your spec scripts, no matter what. They're essential as a calling card, even if they don't get produced.

I love the idea of a super villain that doesn't wear a cape, that doesn't wear a super suit.

I just want to write movies. And I try very hard.

'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market.

'Nice Guys' has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it's heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth.

Writers are nerds.

What strikes me as memorable about 'Predator' was a lot of the decisions that were made so quickly turned out to be so iconic.

I'm cynical about the type of girl that swirls in the Hollywood community.

I've turned down lots and lots of work. Things that could have made me some money.

For years I was doing the excruciating weightlifting of writing scripts - but then I stayed thin and someone else got all the muscles.

I think it's very admirable, in a superhero movie, to be able to take a few risks.

I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it.

I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like 'The Game.'

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.