I grew up loving X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman. Those are obviously the key big ones, but there's always something kind of cool about Aquaman still, the idea of creating a huge world that is on our planet.
— James Wan
I think before 'Saw' came along, there really wasn't a movie franchise that actually went out there and said, 'We're going to come out with one every year during Halloween and make that our trademark.'
I try to keep the number of projects I'm involved in down to one per year.
I think I'm a very sentimental person. Conscious or not, that's what draws me to the kind of films I want to make.
I'm such an action movie junkie that as an action fan, because action scenes are so heightened, we could never really picture ourselves in that scene. So when you're watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium: you know you're out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there.
There's something very cool about that indie spirit that I try to hang on to even now with the bigger films that I'm working on.
I am my own worst critic, and I look at 'Death Sentence' now, and I go, 'Oh wow, I have really come a long way.' In terms of a filmmaker, I feel like my filmmaking language has really matured.
People are so used to seeing John Goodman as a loveable dad or the quirky characters he played in the Coen Brothers films.
The stuff I'm designing, I want my action scenes to be intense.
You can never have too much good blessing.
'Insidious 2' is a direct continuation of the first movie. We literally pick up from where we left off at the end of the first film. And whereas the first movie is a twist on the haunted house genre, the second movie is a twist on the classic domestic thriller.
I like to think if something scares me, then there's a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. The key is creating scenarios that people can relate to.
'Fast and Furious' is the only franchise that I've directed that I did not create from scratch. So it definitely was an eye-opening experience for me coming to that world. I had to be respectful of the roles that had been established by the filmmakers before me, and I was cool with that.
'Saw' really came from that want, the aspiration to make a feature film on our own.
I think the 'Saw' universe, the 'Saw' brand, is too big to just let it just sit there on a shelf.
It's pretty scary to know how quickly time flies.
The size of the budget doesn't make that much of a difference because the kind of issues I have on a low budget film I have on a big budget film as well, but they're just much bigger.
I'd love to be a filmmaker and look back and be like, 'Ah, man, we were part of that whole '80s video nasty thing!'
Whatever it is that makes your movie unique is something you should embrace.
I've always loved action movies. The first films I fell in love with were 'Star Wars' and Steven Spielberg films.
I've made one action movie. But nobody saw it, so I guess that doesn't count for most people.
Geoff Johns is super talented, super smart. Part of what got me excited about the Aquaman character is his re-envisioning of Aquaman, the character, with 'The New 52.'
I love my genre films, but I think when I get older, the way I tell it will be very different to how I told it when I was in my mid-twenties, which is how old I was when I made the first 'Saw.'
'Poltergeist' was really the film that really scarred but fascinated me with puppets and dolls, clowns, and stuff like that. I've always been afraid of clowns, and then my fear of puppets came around, and 'Poltergeist' was the perfect combination to scare me with a clown doll.
The 'Saw' sequels went in a direction I wouldn't have gone in. With 'Insidious 2,' I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in.
There's two aspects of film crafting that I'm very strict about, and that's how I move my camera and where I cut the film.
As a director you're always so busy - you're go, go, go, you're always moving, moving, moving - so I'm not actually privy to all the weird stuff that's happening around me, but for a lot of the cast and crew, that's what I hear stories from them about weird stuff happening.
Just because I make movies in the scary world doesn't mean I want to visit scary worlds.
I use myself as the barometer to gauge what is scary.
Up until 'Fast and Furious 7,' every movie I've made has been a film that I've created, franchises that I've created.
I wasn't delusional at all when I signed on to do 'Furious 7,' that it wasn't my creation. It's the seventh movie in a series, for goodness sake!
I thought the marketing was really smart and really clever and unique at the time. It positioned 'Saw' as a horror film that was different from the other horror films that were in the crowded marketplace.
It's actually smarter to make a dumb film.
When you conceive the scene, you go, 'That is scary, right?' When you shoot it, a lot of times you're not quite sure. Hopefully what you can shoot is what your conception is.
I think what 'Saw' did was really open up a huge branch of lots of these other movies that ultimately retroactively gave the first 'Saw' somewhat of a negative reputation.
To some degree, this re-release is to let people remember what the first 'Saw' film was, and let them know there was a time in the 'Saw' history where it wasn't all about blood and traps.
I love high concept movies, but they can only work if the source of inspiration is really human - if they're driven by pain and strong emotions. Once you connect the audience with that, then I swear you can take them on the craziest journey, and they'll come along.
That's the problem: when you make movies, I find that I never have time to go to the movies and enjoy movies like I used to because I'm so movied out, right? I'm so filmed out that the last thing that I wanna do is, with the little spare time that I have, is stick in a dark room and watch more stuff on the screen.
So many movies get made, and so many go to VOD, which is a market I admire.
'Saw' really was like a student film for me; we expected it to go straight to video. I never expected anyone to see that film, and then it becomes one of the most successful horror franchises.
We all agreed that violence begets violence, and you can't solve issues with more violence.
The flack I got for 'Saw' is why I wanted to direct 'Insidious 2.'
What's funny is, when I made 'Saw,' I got accused of being a fascist, when I made 'Insidious,' I got accused of being godless, and now I made the 'Conjuring' films, and I'm accused of being too much God.
I've always wanted to do a world creation story and visually create this amazing, incredible, magical kingdom.
'Saw' was good and bad. It was good in that it gave me a career start, but it was also negative in that it really marginalized me as a filmmaker.
It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.
I'm a student of cinema in general, not just of one particular genre. So it was very important to me and to my soul to go out and do something different.
No one knows how much we went through to finish 'Furious 7.'
As a filmmaker, you aspire to want to make movies that can hopefully stand the test of time, but you never know when that will happen or if that will happen.
It kind of irks me that the studio films still have to be so safe even though they don't really cost as much to make.
