Upgrade' was a hard one to make.
In a lot of ways knowledge kills fear. Once you know who the boogie man is, once you know what's under the bed, it can still be frightening but that fear of the unknown is gone.
One of the most crucial aspects of a haunted house movie is the fear and disbelief of the characters, because they don't know what's happening to them.
The writing process is the time where nothing's been set in stone. It's a blank slate, or a blank page.
It's a weird little anomaly about horror films in that the more money and noise you have, the less scary it gets.
If I'm going to live in Sydney, I want to live on Bondi Beach.
A lot of times when a film is a success, the fans of that film take ownership of it - it becomes their property.
I think true connectivity is something that is rare in sequels. I mean I love the first 'Die Hard' film; you won't find a bigger 'Die Hard' fan than me. But I feel like with the sequels, they're just taking that character and dropping him in different scenarios. There's no real connective tissue.
After 'Saw,' we got offered every horror remake under the sun, and I was just always thinking, 'I don't see how this could be interesting for me.'
Saw' definitely had an edge to it that wasn't American.
The great thing about horror films is that they work on a low budget. The genre is the star. You don't need big movie stars, and I actually think a lot of times that the best horror films are the low budget contained ones.
I love, and I've always loved, contained sci-fi films that utilize practical effects. I feel like the human eye can tell when something is actually in the frame and when it was inserted digitally later.
The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.
Well you know, the big trick with 'Saw,' the sleight of hand that you have to pull off is that - spoiler alert - the bad guy, the antagonist, is right there in front of your face, literally.
Certain stories need the resources of a studio. If you're telling a story about a giant robot war in outer space, you're going to need the money and the resources most of the time to do it justice.
I always say that the horror genre and the comedy genre are close cousins because they are the two genres where you are attempting to elicit an involuntary vocal response from a crowd of people and you instantly know whether it's working or not.
A lot of the fear about being a first-time director is just starting with a completely blank slate and thinking: 'Is this going to connect with anybody?'
Maybe I'm a product of my era, but I just enjoy the practical effects of 'The Thing' more than CGI aliens.
You might not have the biggest budget or resources or cast, but if you have a great story, people will latch onto it.
I found myself in this conundrum of loving acting, but not liking the path that you have to take to do it. I was just never good at auditioning, so basically I decided I would just write my own stuff and if I could get a role in it, then fine.
