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That's the fun part about being a director. You get to say, 'Oh, now that I'm in charge, I can try and cast whoever I want.' They can always say no, but that's okay.
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Every project is different. Adapting 'Robopocalypse' would be totally different than adapting, say, 'Hunger Games.' Each project has its own life and its own identity. You get into trouble when you think there's one single way to approach everything. Each project, there's a different way to attack it.
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If I had to pick one scary movie, I'd go with John Carpenter's 'The Thing.' That's probably number one.
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I think so much of the horror film is about our primal instincts, and our primal instincts are not just towards violence. It's also towards sex. I feel like horror movies, as much as they're about violence, they're also about sex. It's about our instincts, so in that regard, it's crucial that you honor both of those things.
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I've been lucky between 'Buffy,' 'Angel,' 'Alias,' and then 'Lost.' The thing they all have in common is that they were all fearless. They were not afraid to be different and try something different. Even if you didn't know that it was going to work, just try to do something new and fresh.
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There will be a Skype movie soon... someone will crack the code, and it will be great. Then, there'll be 30 Skype movies, and we'll be like, 'Oh, that's boring.'
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Here's the thing about 'Cabin in the Woods.' I did virtually no research on this movie.
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I had one of those families that let me watch things they should not have let me watch. When I was a kid, I remember I watched 'Alien' at, like, 6. It was traumatizing.
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That's the thing about Lionsgate. They are fearless. No other studio would have made 'Hunger Games' the way they did. They're being fearless in the way they make decisions, and it's paying off for them.
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With horror movies, a bigger budget is actually your enemy. You want to feel the rough edges, the handmade quality to good horror films. It's a genre that benefits from not having everything at your disposal.
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I love going to horror movies - especially when they are fun. I think that they get you in touch with sort of these primal instincts that we all have in the relative safety of the theater.
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You start to fall in love with characters as you work with them, and anytime that you care about your characters and you realize that you're gonna have to kill them, that fear creeps in. It's sad. It's scary, and it's also sad. Because you like these people.
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I just don't want to make the same old movies. I'm not interested in it. Directing's hard. It takes up a lot of your life, and I'm not that interested in making the same old film.
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The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later.
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When Steven Spielberg comes to you and says, 'Hey do you want to write a movie about robots?' You just say yes.
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I think audiences crave something new. I don't think audiences want the same old thing, no matter how much conventional Hollywood tells you that.
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It's not like vampires are inherently bad. It's just people need to make better vampire movies.
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One of the things that's been nice about my career is that I've been able to do so many different things, and variety keeps your creative soul fulfilled. I'm constantly looking to find new things to do. It's just project to project for me. You never know where the next thing's going to come from.
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I love a good harsh horror movie, when it's done well. But there are times when it feels cynical. You can tell when a filmmaker loves the genre, and you can tell when someone's just cashing in a paycheck. Then it becomes a dumbing down - a fetishisation of violence that I react very strongly against.
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I feel the way I always do about sequels. If there's an idea that excites me enough, and it feels like a way to do something new and fresh, then great. But I don't ever want to do a sequel just for the sake of doing a sequel.
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If you worry too much about anything, you end up making bad movies.
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I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.
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There's just something wonderful about getting a small group of people together in an isolated location, and there's something about cabins themselves that imply both horror and fun. When you go to a cabin, you're usually going to have a good time.
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I think that there's good movies and there's bad movies, and sometimes the bad movies spoil it for the rest of us, and we focus on them, but in the long run, all that matters are the good movies. Those are the ones that we will remember.