Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I remember telling ghost stories with my cousins when I was four, five, six-years-old. I've just always loved it. But I think you're drawn to things you're terrified of.
James Wan is somebody who doesn't have any problem coming in and directing somebody else's script, he'll be the director for hire and he has his own style and he loves that.
I do feel like in filmmaking you are largely in control of the perception of you. If you want to be seen as the comedic person you've got to write a comedy and go after that.
If you chose to be an actor, if you take that baton and say 'OK, this is what I want to do with my life.' you're really putting your fate and your life in the hands of others.
I just try to write literally what I love. That's usually the barometer that I use. As trite as it sounds, I'm like, 'what would I want to see? What would I be excited about?'
The good thing about directing a screenplay that you've written is that you see the film in your head as you're writing it and then you see those decisions through to the end.
In a lot of ways knowledge kills fear. Once you know who the boogie man is, once you know what's under the bed, it can still be frightening but that fear of the unknown is gone.
Writing a screenplay is an act of faith. First, that it's interesting enough that anyone would want to make it. Secondly, that anybody would want to watch it, let alone enjoy it.
Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they're mostly pretty crappy.
I think the way to create a lot of terror in a haunted house film is to have a bunch of people who have no idea what's happening to them, and you sort of live the movie through their eyes.
One of our film lecturers, one of the guys teaching the course, said to the departing film class, 'No one in this room is going to make it, as a filmmaker.' I have no idea why he said that.
Well you know, the big trick with 'Saw,' the sleight of hand that you have to pull off is that - spoiler alert - the bad guy, the antagonist, is right there in front of your face, literally.
I think that's the problem, when you're a young filmmaker and you're starting out, you don't know people, you're easily lead, you don't know the right people to talk to, you really need guides.
Certain stories need the resources of a studio. If you're telling a story about a giant robot war in outer space, you're going to need the money and the resources most of the time to do it justice.
When the whole 'Saw' thing died down, I feel like I had praise withdrawals. I had never been congratulated so much on something in my life. So, it was a really amazing whirlwind when 'Saw' came out.
You know, by the time you get to the fourth film in a franchise you're really mining for something different. You're really looking for a way to go about things that the audience hasn't already seen.
I like pointing the camera at the actors and letting them fight. Don't let the camera do the fighting for you, and don't let the camera give them the adrenaline hit. Let the people in the frame do that.
I love, and I've always loved, contained sci-fi films that utilize practical effects. I feel like the human eye can tell when something is actually in the frame and when it was inserted digitally later.
In chatting to directors over the years, including James Wan, they always tell you the war stories. No one ever says, 'Oh, I had a great time on that film.' It's always this went wrong, that went wrong.
What I love about writing is that you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You can just get up in the morning, grab a pad and pen and start writing. With acting you're really beholden to everyone else.
The problem with acting is that there's really no control. You're at the behest of others. Everyone else decides if you did a good job and you have to wait for other people's permission to work as an actor.
I've actually written a children's film called 'The Myth,' which you could say is like a big 'Harry Potter'-esque fantasy for kids, and that's a film I would love to see get made. That's a dream project of mine.
When I directed the third 'Insidious' film I loved it so much that I decided this is what I want to do from now on. I don't even think I would write something as a screenplay now with no intention of directing it.
I wasn't a frustrated writer who really wanted to act or a frustrated writer who really wanted to direct. I was really happy writing screenplays, and there's a lot of people who just do that - they're screenwriters.
I think I've had a lot of experience with watching other people shepherd my ideas with the 'Saw' films. They made four 'Saw' movies without me. I never really had a protective or fierce policy towards that. I let it go.
I mean I met James Wan at film school. That's where we met. I didn't go to film school to find someone else to work with. I was thinking I would go and learn to direct and go and be a director like everyone else at school.
The great thing about horror films is that they work on a low budget. The genre is the star. You don't need big movie stars, and I actually think a lot of times that the best horror films are the low budget contained ones.
Saw' was a film that James Wan and I came up with back in Australia and we were just hoping anyone, literally, anyone would make that film and if nobody would give us the money we were going to shoot it in a garage somewhere.
I think, what happened with 'Dead Silence' is that other people told us that we should be doing that and now that I look back, I realize, 'should' is not a word that comes into an art. It's whatever you're feeling like doing.
I feel like with the first 'Insidious' film we had a massive cache of stories and scares that we'd built up over the years. It was like a band, you know they say a band has forever to write their first album because no one cares.
If you look back at a film like 'Dawn of the Dead' - You can either watch it as a straight-up genre film and have fun with zombies being shot, or you can look at it as a metaphor for consumerism. Or a metaphor for the Vietnam war.
The good thing with 'Insidious' and 'The Further' is that it's so nebulous, this supernatural world, that it allows you to bend things. There's a lot of room, it's very malleable, like how in the second film we had a lot of time travel.
I found myself in this conundrum of loving acting, but not liking the path that you have to take to do it. I was just never good at auditioning, so basically I decided I would just write my own stuff and if I could get a role in it, then fine.
I always say that the horror genre and the comedy genre are close cousins because they are the two genres where you are attempting to elicit an involuntary vocal response from a crowd of people and you instantly know whether it's working or not.
I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to paint myself as, you know, the evangelist for practical effects or some sort of anti CG guy because it's really a tool. Like filmmaking is this toolbox and you use what's appropriate in relation to the story.
Writing feels safe, you know, it's a hard job, but at least you're in your office or wherever you are and there's no one standing over your shoulder staring at what you're writing. And when you're directing, everybody's looking over your shoulder.
It's always an interesting experience with the 'Saw' films, when a sequel comes out that I didn't have anything to do with, creatively, because here's this idea, this story, and this character that I created for James Wan, but now it doesn't need me anymore.
Prior to 'Insidious Chapter 3,' I was happy to write movies for James Wan to direct as I felt very much that I was one half of a duo. I looked at us as a team who works together and I was happy to be part of that, I was happy to effectively be the bass player in The Beatles.
I'd always had this romantic idea, ever since I've been writing scripts, that I would travel one day and pull up stumps, as we say in Australia. It's a cricket reference. You can Google it. Pull up stumps in some country like Italy or Spain and do my little Truman Capote thing.
When 'Psycho' came out back in 1960, it was seen as an abomination and as this really gory thing. We all watch 'Psycho' today, of course, and think it's so tame since there's no blood or any real gore in it. But for the standards of the day when it was released, it was extreme.
When you sit down to write a film, you direct it in your head. If you are writing a scene, you are watching the scene. And maybe it's different when you are writing a novel because you are thinking of it in terms of being read. But films are only consumed one way - through the eyes and the ears.
That's one of the great things about creativity. You labor away in a room, and when you're writing a film, it couldn't be more of a solitary activity or a lonelier job, but if you then write a film that gets made and goes out into the world, it kind of flies away from you. It's not yours anymore.
I think true connectivity is something that is rare in sequels. I mean I love the first 'Die Hard' film; you won't find a bigger 'Die Hard' fan than me. But I feel like with the sequels, they're just taking that character and dropping him in different scenarios. There's no real connective tissue.
Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I'm driving or I'm in the shower, you'll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn't have to be much, it doesn't have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won't leave your head and that's when you know you've got something.
I remember when James Wan and I did the first 'Saw' movie, a lot of people would say to us, 'Well, you left the door open for a sequel.' And we would say, 'No, we literally closed the door!' We thought it was a nice ending. Little did we know that the producers had other ideas once the film was a hit.
Australia, most of the filmmakers there write a film and they direct it. There's a lot of writer/directors there, because nobody wants to write a script and then let it go when they've had that much of a personal investment to it, because you're not getting paid huge amounts of money in Australia to direct.
I love watching audiences scream. I imagine it's the same joy that a director feels who has made a comedy when he or she is sitting at the back of a theater listening to the audience laugh. That sound of laughter is so sweet to a comedy director and that's exactly how a horror film feels when you hear the audience scream.
So when I look back at 'Saw' and 'Insidious,' I just think, 'Wow. Both of those films went way past what we ever could've dreamt for them' and it makes me genuinely thankful, like every single day, once a day, even if it's just for thirty seconds, sitting in my car, I have a moment where I'm like, I can't believe I'm here.