Quotes

[on co-writing Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)] Shane Black and I were contracted to work on the screenplay together. But partnering is very difficult, especially if one of the partners is a contentious pain-in-the-butt like I am. Eventually, we turned in a draft, took a story credit, and went our separate ways. Shane is, by the way, simply a great film writer.

[on the possibility of another movie featuring Remo Williams, The Destroyer] "Look, guys, what do I know? We'll have a destroyer movie when somebody, not me, is willing to put 25-50 million dollars to make one. From my lips to god's ears. Let's hope."

Please feel free to tell anyone who asks that I am not, repeat NOT, married to Bart Simpson's voice.

Early on, when The Destroyer series was just getting started, Dick Sapir and I agreed that we did not want to keep writing the same tale over and over, which was the usual procedure in series books at the time. That led to us tweaking the rigorous confines of the action-adventure novel into a vehicle where we could write about myth and magic, androids and vampires, fantasy and its corollary, political satire, and just about anything else that caught our fancy.

[on Remo Williams: The Prophecy (1988)] The TV pilot was better because it was based on a novella that Dick and I had written, and it got the basic point right in that it was about the growing father-son relationship between Remo and Chiun.

[on Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)] The movie was a near miss and the shame was that it was so easily correctable. You can't have a great hero without a great villain. James Bond has guys who want to blow up London or enslave the world or steal all the gold in Fort Knox, yet we wound up with a guy who was selling cheap rifles to the government. That's not going to drag people into the theaters.

[on continuing The Destroyer series without writing partner Richard Sapir] Toward the end of the 80's, Dick and I were so busy with other work that we decided we would end The Destroyer. But then, tragically, dick died, leaving behind a one-year-old son, and I was faced with a dilemma. Writing the series without Dick Sapir would not be fun anymore, but I wanted to keep it alive for his family. So I contracted it out to various publishers.

[on writing with Shane Black] Shane Black, a very talented screenwriter, wrote the first 'Lethal Weapon'. He was a fan of my books and he invited me in to work on 'Lethal Weapon 2'. While I have great regard and admiration for Shane, it soon became apparent that we did not really work well together. My way of working is to make sure the story is absolutely in place before I write even the first word. My feeling is that Shane works more by the seat of his pants, writing right from the beginning.

So after we managed to cobble together a first draft, both of us by mutual agreement left the project and it was finished by others, but let me be real clear: Shane Black is a major screenwriting talent, far better than I am... but partnerships have to work on a lot of different levels and ours didn't. More's the pity."

Some pest, writing a guttersnipe expose, once called me and said that he had heard I had a fistfight with Clint Eastwood during my writing of "The Eiger Sanction." I replied that I wasn't that stupid. Also, that of all the people I ever met in Hollywood, Clint Eastwood was one of only two that I didn't want to punch in the mouth. Clint spoiled me for Lala Land because when I worked for him, he was smart and funny and made decisions quick and straight and I thought everybody out there was like that. It took a long while of suffering with other film jobs before I learned there was only one Clint. Goodbye Hollywood.