Quotes

[talking about Tìm Lại Ký Ức (1990)] Verhoeven has moments. He's talented and he does have some grand sci-fi visual things to see from time to time, but he's a very flawed director and Total Recall had a lot of pitfalls for him and he fell in most of them. In particular, whenever he started to flounder and didn't know what to do, he would start throwing in violence. He'd say bring in all the rubber body parts and the blood hoses and everything and we'll start ripping people to shreds and squirt blood everywhere. And he'd keep shooting that until he overcame his nerves and got his feet on the ground and would start directing in some reasonable way again. So you'd end up with these intermittent scenes of absurdly excessive maimings at sort of intervals, and usually what he was substituting for were scenes that involved humor in the original [script]. And I realized, 'Oh, he's not good at humor. He doesn't know how to tell a joke onscreen.' Too bad, because some of the important stuff he did very well on Total Recall. It had grand moments.

The one that was certainly best directed, far and away above the rest, was Alien. Ridley Scott's directorial thing there was absolutely wonderful. I haven't had another director equal it.

[talking about Lifeforce (1985)] The performances too could have been computer generated, it probably would have been a great improvement. We had the one and only Tobe Hooper at the helm which is approximately like having Bozo the Clown at the helm.

It's been said over and over again by writers of scary stories that a writer can't scare a reader unless that writer scares himself or herself first. So, you can't excite anyone in the audience unless you're excited writing the script! You're taking yourself for a ride before you take the audience for a ride!

With "Alien", I figured out quite simply that, as an audience member, what you DON'T see scares you more than what you see. In horror films, the scares that really grab the audience and build the tension for them don't come from the monster jumping out of the shadows! The terror comes from the slow times in between those pay-off scenes in which the characters are talking and planning -- waiting for something to jump out at them!

I have a low boredom threshold. Some writers can write the same thing over and over again and remain happy with that. However, I only enjoy doing something that I have not done before. If I've done it well, I don't want to do it anymore. Once I know how to do something, it loses interest for me. I don't care anymore.

Hollywood is just a machine, they have a process. There's this standing assumption among producers and studios that no script is any good. Every script that they buy or have written must be rewritten by several other authors before they will film it. The trouble is most producers have no judgment. Therefore, if a given draft of a script is excellent and filmable, they can't tell or won't make the mental effort to determine it. They automatically have it rewritten. Since most scripts in Hollywood are truly wretched, this process has a homogenizing effect and improves it. But if the script is really, really good, the process will lower its quality.

[explaining his unused concept for Tìm Lại Ký Ức (1990) in an April 1991 interview] That wasn't supposed to be a three-fingered Martian handprint [on the machine]. That was supposed to have been a print of [Quaid's] hand which matched only his hand. Quaid, Earth's top secret agent, went to Mars and entered this compound. The machine killed him and created a synthetic duplicate. He is that synthetic duplicate. He cannot be killed because he can anticipate danger before it happens. He is also omnipotent and because he cannot be killed, Earth wants to kill him but cannot. That's why they go to all the trouble to erase his brain to make him think he's nobody. It's the only way they can control him. Audiences don't question it when movie heroes go through adventures and don't get killed. I thought it was clever to actually have a reason for it. At the end of the picture, Quaid puts his hand on the device and it all comes back to him, who he really is. His total recall of his identity is that he is a creation of a Martian machine. He is, in effect, a resurrection of the Martian race in a synthetic body. He turns and says to all the other characters, 'It's gonna be fun to play God'".