Quotes from Christopher McQuarrie

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it's your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world. Our options narrowing down to petty crime or minimum wage. So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us.

Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Söze.

My films do very well on home video.

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.'