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
Ideally, I'd like to have a movie that people like and makes money.
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 always feel like an outsider. I'll always feel like the nerd at the party.
Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.
When you're making a film, you don't really have time to consider what the whole of your film is. And then, when you're releasing your film and promoting your film, you're looking at it in a different way. Then, as you move away from it, you start to look at it objectively and think, 'What could I have done better?'
I've looked at all of Hitler's speeches thinking that there's gotta be one where he's 'I'm Hitler!', but there weren't any. His speeches were all about hope and prosperity - he ran on a platform of peace and prosperity. Hitler speeches that makes him sound like a villain are pretty hard to find, he was very detached from what he was doing, he kept himself compartmentalised from it.
When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.
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.