Christopher McQuarrie

“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.”

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

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

“I'm a big fan of the movies of the '60s, more than a fan of the movies of the '70s.”

“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.”

“Action to me is something very fun to shoot.”

“A lot of books, if you take them at face value, they're just not gonna work as films.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.'”

“Oh my God, you look at all the uniforms in Star Wars, and it's all Nazi iconography.”

“With 'Rubicon,' Mark Long and Dan Capel have created the perfect environment for an intense action franchise.”

“History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.”

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

“You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.”

“The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.”

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