The joy of making a genre film is that you have audiences in that place, and it's a perfect place to start because all it takes is finding ways to startle them out of that complacency and encourage a different kind of engagement.
I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.
I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.
When you see The Situation in person, it can startle some people.
I hate jump scares. I really hate them. I think there's nothing special about being able to startle someone - that's an involuntary reflex, and it makes people laugh.
Time dissolves in summer anyway: days are long, weekends longer. Hours get all thin and watery when you are lost in the book you'd never otherwise have time to read. Senses are sharper - something about the moist air and bright light and fruit in season - and so memories stir and startle.
However now we can create a sound that can truly startle someone and in terms of sound effects I think the environment that we are in now has improved dramatically.
It was very difficult to startle or surprise someone with a particular sound during the family computer era.
I don't startle easily.
I've done more than 100 films, which is a sizeable chunk of life in cinema, so if something can startle me, then I think we can say we're looking at something fairly new.
