What I feel like science fiction fans respond to is just people trying to hit them with something new, something they haven't seen. And if you do that you'll be okay.
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.
The most fun part of making a horror movie is watching it with an audience.
The great thing about 'The Exorcist' is it's dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it's a documentary style.
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 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.
I don't think humor is something to be afraid of.
I really liked that documentary, 'Room 237.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you have a year where a few good horror films come out, all of the sudden, horror is back and everyone's talking about how it's a vintage year for horror.
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.
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.
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.
For me in a horror film, just looking down a long corridor and seeing somebody standing there, the simplest thing in the world, has a really seismic impact to me.
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.
It is nice to be validated by audiences and have people come up to you after a screening and tell you that they loved the movie. It never gets old.
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.
