I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.
I don't know what is in store for the movie business any better than anybody else does, but it does seem like my kind of movies are a little trickier than it used to be - or maybe a lot trickier.
People are disappearing from movies, and normal human behaviour is disappearing from movies... You are not always fighting a creature in life. That's part of life, it's a pretty big part of life, but it's not all of life.
Right now, if you're interested in being a dramatic actor, they're not making that many just regular dramas. Movies have to have some other thing going on.
Cinema is changing every week, and multiplex audiences are demanding every week.
It's kind of true that they just start making the same movie over and over again. It's also true that the times dictate what kind of movies get made and what kind are not. So I'm always looking for something that's a little fresh and something that I haven't seen before.
But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be.
Most movies now are drama, and the commercially successful ones are, sadly, about adulterous relationships.
People didn't suddenly wake up one morning and unanimously say 'I'm fed up with midbudget dramas. I'm only going to see action tent poles from now on!'
I think in the late '80s and early '90s horror was dead.
Every five years, there is a shift in cinema space, but we are slow to catch that. Young people understand that shift.
I think action movies on the whole have moved more and more into large spectacle, even leaving out super hero movies that seem to me to be more a fantastic science fiction than they are action movies.
I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.
I'm really glad Westerns have had a revival. Hopefully our little resurgence will last a while.
The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.
I am trying change trends in movies, just as I am trying to change trends in politics.
Westerns pop up every so often, everybody does a western and then they all die.
I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it's 3% good, 97% stupid.
Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore.
It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre.
There was that last blast of Westerns that came out in the Seventies, those Vietnam/Watergate Westerns where everything was about demystification. And I like that about those movies.
There will be a Skype movie soon... someone will crack the code, and it will be great. Then, there'll be 30 Skype movies, and we'll be like, 'Oh, that's boring.'
Probably the worst thing that ever happened to the movies was the megahit.
'Lethal Weapon' sold apropos of nothing when I was very young, but that was a very different market.
If one horror film hits, everyone says, 'Let's go make a horror film.' It's the genre that never dies.
