Tony Gilroy Quotes

I worked for a lot of directors.

Fear changes everything. We’re animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I’m not exempt from that.

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

I like emotions, but I really don’t like sentimentality, and I don’t like when things break their spell.

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

I like knowing where I am in action sequences if I’m supposed to.

You can’t teach someone to be imaginative.

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

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

Ambiguity depletes as your budget rises.

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.

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

You have to know human behaviour … And the quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

You change or you hide your head in the sand.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

The people in the Philippines are so extraordinarily nice.

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence?

You just try to find something that interests you, and particular something that interests you that’s gonna consume you the way that these big movies just really eat you up.

No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter.

I’ve never taken a job on anything I didn’t want to do.

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

I like movies that pop, that have a little bit of candy on, that freedom to have a little bit of extra fun, but are rooted in real behaviour. Rooted in cause and effect, never violating reality.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Different people work different ways.

I prefer writing originals.