Quotes from Tony Gilroy

Developing films with directors, developing films with actors, is a poor percentage play for a screenwriter.

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.

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

Once a film costs a certain amount of money, things have to round off.

I prefer writing originals.

You can't teach someone to be imaginative.

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I can't imagine directing from someone else's script.

I worked for a lot of directors.

When I start something, I know people I am working with, it's a project they're interested in.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

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.

I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.

You change or you hide your head in the sand.

I don't like to be crazy on different levels all of the time.

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

I used to be, when I was young, I used to be extremely regular and very organized.

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.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

I'm trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded for doing that.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

I love IMAX when it works right.

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.