I'm pretty demanding with myself and my work, and I always put a lot of pressure on myself. I try to do the best job I can every time.
If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very important for me to expose the audience to real elements.
As a director, there is nothing more fun than seeing an audience screaming and jumping. You are the ultimate puppet master, controlling the emotions of the audience.
As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.
'The Omen,' 'The Exorcist,' those movies for me are the quintessential horror movies that still scare me as an adult.
Every day I spend in Hollywood, I start to realize how many films are made with no heart and no love. They just do it for the paycheck, and I cannot imagine making a film that way.
I'm inspired when I find out about something that I didn't know was a remake. An example is, of course, stuff like 'The Fly,' or 'The Thing,' or even 'The Blob.' For our generation, all those things, whether it was 'The Blob' or 'The Fly' or something else, we had no idea they were remakes.
Maybe because I'm a child of the '80s, but for me, a sequel is a story that follows the previous one, and sometimes if you haven't seen the original, then you don't understand the second one. Like 'Back to the Future 2.' If you haven't seen the first one, you're not going to get anything out of 'Back to the Future 2.'
In 'Clockwork Orange,' you're there with your eyes, watching all those things, your brain goes off, ahh, exposes you to so many things, and at the end of the day, it's just like a roller coaster. Why do you jump in a roller coaster? You want a thrill.
A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.
If you think about it, a lot of great horror films have bad sequels just because the market demands you to make the other one right away. Thank God no one in the 'Evil Dead' family thinks that way.
I'm a big fan of movies, but I'm a bigger fan of filmmaking itself. I fell in love with it when I was very young, and I have always loved to learn the craft, every aspect of it.
I watched 'Evil Dead' when I was 12. I was going through all the horror I could grab. I remember going to the video store and asking for something 'real.' And the guy gave me the 'Evil Dead' VHS. When you're 12, you're not supposed to see that.