Growing up as a kid in Detroit, way back, there was a movie station that would show old kinescope reproductions of old movies, and I remember seeing Bela Lugosi for the first time and being duly frightened out of my wits.
For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.
I'd like to produce. I'd like to come up with ideas and collaborate with people and directors and writers that I like, be a part of movies that have the same idea that the movies that impacted me have. I'd like to be able to do that for people.
I try to watch a movie a day, if not more, and through movies, I learned about so many different political themes I hadn't been interested in and cultural things I hadn't been aware of and economic factors I hadn't thought about.
The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they d...
I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.
I've done all kinds of movies, but I wanna do some more independent films that are not your run-of-the-mill type movies like 'American Splendor', which I had a big part in, that are really trying to do something unique.
There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense.
You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.
If you think about movies that are adapted from books, they never feel like enough. There's always too much cut out in the end. You either make a five hour movie or you leave out stuff that should be in there.
I don't know many women who can relate to Sharon Stone and the kind of movies she does. I don't know a lot of guys who can relate to Tom Cruise's movies because they're on a kind of fantastic level.
I'm more of a thriller-horror fan - things that could really happen. I don't like scary movies, the 'Saw' movies scare the crap out of me - I think I've seen two of them and I wanted to go crawl in a hole.
I like emotional horror. I don't like horror movies. I hate them. But, if you can make emotional horror movies, I'm in. If I can care and root for the main character, then I'm in.
I've done so many Lifetime movies; at this point, I'll be going through airport security, and the lady there will be like, 'I took the weekend off and I saw four of your movies.' And I say: 'You've been watching Lifetime, right?'
When you do a first movie, you're contractually supposed to do the second one and then you don't do it, you become an executive producer. That's why there are a ton of directors who have executive producer credits on other movies.
When I was a kid, I was into psychological thrillers. When I was 12, my favorite movie was 'Thirteen.' I just really liked movies that showed an extreme range in acting. That's what made me want to become an actress.
When I'm shooting a movie, I'm always in an invisible theater seat. I respect the fact that people have worked hard all week and want to go to the movies on the weekend and be entertained.
Really interesting genre films, especially monster movies, evoke the fears of the times intentionally. Our starting point was 'Godzilla' - the original movie was released less than 10 years after Hiroshima, and it's a classic in Japan.
It's crazy when you think about the 'Apes' franchise and how dark all of the endings are and how dark the movies are, and yet there's something very pleasurable about these movies. It really comes down to the potency of this idea, of seeing intellige...
You can be mediocre, the way most actors are, and you can still be a top movie star, even if your movies are boring and predictable. All you have to do is know how to sell yourself, let yourself be manufactured.
I worked on three independent movies in close succession and... I really learned from those directors how to stay on budget, make your days, get it done, keep everyone happy, which is a huge thing in a movie, and to steer the ship.
