Robert Duncan McNeill Quotes

Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don't really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.

I genre-hop quite a lot. I love manipulating genre and deconstructing it and making it irrelevant. Genreless music is great because it means you get to write in any genre that you like.

For film and theater, you know how the story starts; you know how the story ends. With TV, you don't. It's literally like living real life in character.

Sometimes, a scene goes on too long and, with this being a suspense story and murder mystery that you're trying to discover through her heightened paranoia, you don't want scenes that take you on a tangent. Sometimes, you love those scenes, but you know that it's better not to be in the overall film. So, I'm not sad that they're not in the main movie, but I do think it's fun for people to get to watch them, if they want to.

...and then a murder mystery will occur.

The thought of filming in London was a big draw because I could stay in my house. I read it, and I was really taken with it because it felt at once very unapologetic for what it was, which is a romantic comedy. But at the same time, a little spiky and a little truthful.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

In America now every romantic comedy is interpreted politically. I can remember when I was promoting Black Hawk Down we were all being asked what it said about September 11th. Well, it was shot before that happened, so, nothing.

[Maigret Sets a Trap] was always going to be the first film, and it seemed to be quite a nice story. But of course it meant that here I was playing this new character for the first time, in a place where he had been a relative failure, as all these people had been murdered and the pressure was on. Rather than starting optimistically with his pipe in front of the fireplace, he was in quite a difficult place.

So much in TV today, you don't get to feel empathetic for the villain. The villains are the villains and the heroes are the heroes. It's very black and white.

I read Zuleika Dobson with pleasure. It represents the Oxford that the two World Wars have destroyed with a charm that is not likely to be reproduced anywhere in the world for the next thousand years.

So I get all the references and I totally get the humor and it's really fun. This - it's kind of a mash up of so many different genres and things that kind of, sort of are just part of youth culture right now. Music and action and video games, and it's kind of amazing to see it all piled into one film.

In TV, you can really get into not only great characters, but also the relationships. There are all of the backstories and all of the relationships that you have with every person in your life, and the relationships those people have with each other. It's just more dense and there's more time to tell stories.

The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.

In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

My daughter loved All About Steve movie, because she's 6 feet tall and she's different. And I got a lot of great e-mails from people who are different. I'm a gay icon. I'll just say it. That's what they say to me, so I'll accept it. I got so many e-mails saying that it meant so much to those people. My daughter said, "They didn't like it just because she didn't get the guy! If they had lived happily ever after, people would have liked that movie."

In terms of Bridget [Jones] I honestly don't know. One thing I can say for sure is that all of these stories have been an honest, instinctive expression of something I felt or observed at the time. I would never cynically think "Oh that would sell well next."

People know where romantic comedies are going. It's not brain surgery to figure out the end of a romantic comedy.

There seems to be this tendency toward denigrating romantic comedies as of late because it becomes something sort of cheesy or whatever. Whereas this embraced what it was. As a fan of When Harry Met Sally or Annie Hall, as a demonstration of what romantic comedy could be and should be, I immediately phoned Nira back and said, "Yeah, I'd like to do this. It'll be fun."

Chick Lit uses humor to reflect life back to us. It's a very comforting genre, and it's the first time our generation has had a voice. It's a very important genre for all of those reasons.

I'm not a huge fan of romantic comedies - my taste goes much more to the offbeat and dark. I'd love to sink my teeth into something like Fargo.

I still write. I'd love to write more trashy chick-lit. At the moment, I just re-write my own lines, which probably annoys most directors - though, thankfully not Adam Brooks!

I'm a huge romantic comedy fan and have been in this business for 17 years and I think for all 17 I'd hoped and dreamed and wished to some day be in a romantic comedy myself.

Snarky, sexy and so much fun. Sugar Jamison is sure to be a hit!.

Next up [new TV stars] was [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis on 'The Colgate Comedy Hour.'