Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that most of the good horror films made in the U.S. are indie films. You might get 'The Ring' or 'The Others,' but most are independently produced.
— James Wan
I loved 'Jaws.' I think that is not really a horror film, but it made me afraid of the ocean for a very long time.
I love what I did in 'Death Sentence,' but that was a low budget action film.
There are expectations with sequels, and people want them to be bigger and better than the prequel.
All my movies are about people with some ideology, but guess what? It never works out.
A lot of these types of films - the vigilante or revenge drama - were so popular in the '70s because there was a feeling in the culture of loss of control.
With 'Insidious 2,' I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in.
If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.
I see my actors as my collaborators.
I love 'MacGyver.' I do!
For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.
We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.
I kind of joke that creating franchises is a lot like directing pilot episodes of TV series. You set a look and feel and kind of pass it on.
'Death Sentence' really is a throwback to the '70s style revenge drama with moments of action. It's like a contemporary 'Death Wish' with a much more thriller style storyline, but the action scenes I shot very much in the style of '70s films like 'The French Connection.'
I remembered a long time ago when 'A League of Their Own' came out, and they had the opening sequence with an older Geena Davis. We all just thought it was amazing, but you find out it actually wasn't Geena Davis; it wasn't makeup. It was basically finding an actress that looked like her, and then Geena just dubbed her voice.
'The Conjuring' was a massive success, and honestly, it set the bar quite high. So I was nervous about making the sequel, and I wasn't sure if it will still have the same impact as the first one did. But that's what moved me to make the sequel.
I think that the first 'Saw' was really more of a psychological film about two people stuck in a room, and the traps and games that fans seem to embrace so much now were quite a small portion of the film.
People are so used to seeing John Goodman as a lovable dad or the quirky characters he played in the Coen Brothers films.
I didn't direct any of the 'Saw' sequels, but people thought I did.
Isn't it crazy to think that we've explored space more than we have explored the depths of our ocean? That just fires up my imagination about potential sea monsters and cool creatures, that kind of stuff.
I guess I have a fascination with the idea of puppeteering. I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do.
I'm a big movie fan, and I want to make movies in every genre. I want to make my romantic comedy one day.
For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It's not just visual, it's audio as well. It's emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.
For me, what usually makes a horror sequence scary is the journey not the destination.
'Saw,' in many ways, was like my student film. The first crappy student film you don't really want people to see.
'Poltergeist' was really the film that really scarred, but fascinated, me with puppets and dolls, clowns and stuff like that.
When I am making a sequel, it needs to be different from what you have already seen. Yet, it needs to maintain a certain discipline so that people still associate it with the prequel.
When I was a kid, my grandfather used to watch Bollywood films. There's a lot of colour and vibrancy to the Indian films.
With all the crap that's going on around the world, you kind of want to do what you can to protect the ones you love.
Not many people remember this, but in the first 'Death Wish' film, Charles Bronson doesn't actually go after the people that hurt his family: he just goes after every punk. He just blows them all away.
We all live in some kind of home, so the idea that our home could be invested with a supernatural entity is kind of frightening, I think.
I grew up loving X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman.
I took a break from horror; I made three ghost movies back-to-back-to-back.
Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.
Not many people realize this, but I'm a really squeamish guy. When I watch other horror films that are really over-the-top with their blood and guts, I cannot watch it.
