Christopher McQuarrie
Christopher McQuarrie
Christopher McQuarrieis an American screenwriter, director and producer. A regular collaborator of director Bryan Singer, he co-wrote the screenplay of Singer's Public Access, wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects, co-wrote and produced Valkyrie and co-wrote Jack the Giant Slayer and Edge of Tomorrow...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth31 May 1968
CityPrinceton Junction, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.
Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."
You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.
The biggest challenge is not coming up with the stunt, the biggest challenge is designing a sequence around it that sort of justifies its existence.
I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.
While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.
Action to me is something very fun to shoot.
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.
Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
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. Theres even reverence to a screenplay.
Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.
If you're surrounded by good people and you're really honest with yourself, you'll be delivered.
My films do very well on home video.
Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.