Quotes

...if you get a bunch of cynical people making a big-budget Hollywood movie, the irony is it doesn't work. [referring to his experience with 'The Last Action Hero']

If you want to do only what you want, be prepared to make no money. If you want to get paid, you're going to have to do something that people want to see. And I've tried pretty hard to balance those two things without getting angry. It's not like, I'm an important artist so I deserve to be rich and do whatever I want to do.

[his experience co-writing the original draft of Last Action Hero (1993)] The weird thing is that The Simpsons (1989) inspired it in the first place....We thought, 'If this show can destroy genres even as it embraces them, why can't we do it in live action?' But somewhere along the way, the movie got lost. And nobody came out smelling like a rose. (...) We dubbed it 'Reverse Purple Rose' after we realised it was the opposite of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a character comes out of the screen into the real world. (...) We rented every action movie we could think of and made a checklist. Does the second-most evil bad guy die before or after the most evil bad guy? Does the hero have a Vietnam buddy? It was fun, although watching Steven Seagal movies one after another can be soul-crushing. (...) [The premiere] was not a pleasant experience. People kept saying, 'Did you do all those fart jokes?' 'No, no, that wasn't me.' 'Why did you have a kid thrown off a roof in the opening sequence? It made my kid cry.' 'I didn't write that!' [Empire 2012]