- [on Ridley Scott] Nobody does toga movies like my brother.
- [on Tom Cruise] A magnet for women.
- [on Days of Thunder (1990)] The problem was, we started on the movie without a script. Tom [Cruise] was already part of the line-up when I arrived and they said: "Tom can sit behind the wheel of a race car and smoke a cigarette and this movie will make a fortune." And that was the attitude we went in with. Robert Towne would be writing the scenes at night, we would shoot in the morning. It was a dangerous way to work. But we really thought, "Look - it's racing cars and it's Tom Cruise!" But you always have to get a story and you've got to get character first, and we hadn't.
- (The studio) saw a cut of The Hunger (1983) and all of a sudden my parking spot at Warner Brothers was painted out.
- I always get criticized for style over content, unlike Ridley's films that go into the classic box right away. Mine sort of hover. Maybe with time people will start saying they should be classics, but I think I'm always perceived as reaching too hard for difference, and difference doesn't categorize you as the 'classic category'.
- The biggest edge I live on is directing. That's the most scary, dangerous thing you can do in your life.
- The scariest thing in my life is the first morning of production on all my movies. It's the fear of failing, the loss of face, and a sense of guilt that everybody puts their faith in you and not coming through?
- I like changing the pace of my life, changing my discipline. It gives me ideas for how to see the world differently.
- Ridley makes films for posterity. My films are more rock 'n' roll.
- [on Top Gun (1986) and similar films] I see these pilots as rock 'n' roll stars of the skies. I see deep blue skies and silver steel. I hear the rock music and smell the jet fuel. I love shooting real things in the real world.
- [on making action films] The most dangerous moments come from boredom. Each of those slam bang sequences take hours to set up. The menace come from the stunt men who get so sick of standing around that they get careless. It's usually best to cut down on the waiting by planning two stunt sequences at once.
- [while reminiscing on his early days in Hollywood and career] Hopefully I'll be viewed as an extreme character when I pass on, you know. They might say "Wow he was out there. He was a fucking lunatic." And I like to be viewed in that way. But um, those years there seemed to be a lot of extreme individuals, and hopefully I'll be perceived and put in the same box.
- [on Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and working with Eddie Murphy] I loved Beverly Hills Cop (1984). I wish I'd made that movie. I thought it was fantastic. But I remember being terrified of working with a star as big as Eddie Murphy. I couldn't talk in front of him at first. I was tongue-tied. And the idea of doing comedy terrified me. But Don and Jerry just kept saying, 'It's okay, you can do it, you can do it.' I tried to bring my style to this genre, the comedy-action movie, that really didn't have much style. Eddie, though, I loved him. I was really on a roll then, I had great fun doing it. It is possibly the most frightening thing I had done in my life and then the most rewarding. I thought he was going to decimate me. He'd play games with me - he'd say, 'This shot won't be in the movie. It's arty crap.' He'd lay bets on it. So I kept all those arty shots in the movie! He actually applauded the style in the end, but really I just let him do his thing, roll into who he was. I thought as long as I let that happen I would be alright.
- The Fan (1996) was a go project and I wanted to work with Bobby DeNiro. I didn't have much interest in the script originally. In fact I'd passed on it twice before. But I very much wanted to work with Robert De Niro.
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