Quotes from Shane Black

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

You have to keep surprising your audience.

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.

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.

I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story.

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.

'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.

I have no power, and that's what's so humbling.

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

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

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.

I go back to read 'Tarzan' books every now and again or 'John Carter,' and you realize Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a great writer by any means. But he was a great storyteller. You wanted to see what happened next.

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

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 think, in big-budget movies where everything seems so poured over and restricted and the studio wants to examine every frame to make sure it's vetted properly, you lose a little bit of playfulness.

Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.

You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.

Estimation, assessment, looking back, retrospecting things - those are intellectual concepts, and they're always so subject to shifts in the wind.

The worst of the action films are the ones where everything is one shout from beginning to finish. And there's no differentiation between beats, like small or big, or quiet or expansive. It's all just one loud shout.

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

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

I try not to think about anybody's reaction to what I do.

The great thing about detective stories, in particular, the case can always be interesting as well as the characters.

If someone fires a gun in a movie, it should always be a big deal. I don't like movies where someone shoots at someone else but they just run away and manage to dodge the bullet. Or people are all firing at each other continuously for 10 minutes.