The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog.
Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I’ve done that since the beginning. So that’s not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.
You know, there’s a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.
Long live the new flesh.
Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.
If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it’s obviously going to be a disaster.
Technology is us. There is no separation. It’s a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe. I’m rather sure of that.
Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.
Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.
Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.
Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.
My dentist said to me the other day: I’ve enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?
When you’re in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That’s the consolation of philosophy.
You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don’t think there’s anything man wasn’t meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn’t do.
I’m just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren’t going to be alive forever – that bothered me.
I don’t have a moral plan, I’m a Canadian.
I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation.
I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I’ve been sometimes compared to those other guys. We’re after different game.
I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be – although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.
The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn’t actually be fun for me. It wouldn’t be exciting.