I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them.
I think it's always a challenge when you're telling a story that people know. But hopefully, good storytelling - well, there's two things. One is, you definitely have to have surprises and changes so that people are - you keep them interested, you take them down roads that they didn't expect and give them suspense and surprise.
If you do really good storytelling, things that people also might anticipate and that they might have seen before - there's a reason we go back to stories that we love - so, even if there is a familiarity, if you can do it a different way and hopefully do it well enough, you actually feel the satisfaction of that anticipation given back to you.
A good horror film is something that taps into something absolutely truthful about us - about what we want, about what we're terrified of - and brings that to life on screen in such a way that we can get close enough to that character to let our defenses down and want them to be safe.
I like violence because I like looking at it and I like understanding emotional and physical violence and how they work with one another... It's operating in all these levels of hopefully - Oedipus is one of my favorite stories, that's like falling down a well when you read that - so that would be the hope, that each thing causes the next.
I think it's why we're able to look at with comic book stories or origin stories, why is it that we can keep retelling these stories over and over? And hopefully it's because it hits something so universal and so primal inside of us that we actually yearn for that same story over and over. But toned and different form, and updated and modernized, and I can go into the specifics.
Again, let's pay all due respect to De Palma and put him over here so we're not saying, "Mine's deeper, mine's better." Let's just say, in reading the book, what I fell in love with was this mother-daughter story that was so amazing and so profound.
If we educate ourselves, then the desire and need to have art as a part of our lives will happen organically. I would invite anyone to look at cultures where art is squashed. Do you want to live in North Korea? We have a president who doesn't read at all. There's a lot to worry about. I just wish, as a collective, we were much smarter.
You try to do as much as you can on set because practical looks cool and practical looks great. Until you get to a point where the reality is you look at it - and I went through this in my last movie which was a war film, which my brother fought in Iraq and I did a ton of research and as much as I could made it documentary-like - and then at some point on set, the reality is somebody says to you, "You know, you can use a real squib and you can have three hours of clean up and you can lose five shots or we can do that blood explosion in post and you can get those five extra shots."
There are a number of times when we have found, there's a number of old-school special effects in here that are fantastic, but there are definitely some times that we went digital and you're not going to tell the difference, I don't think. I think it just serves the storytelling because that's just the era that we live in.
Art changed my life. I mean, I would say art saved me. I believe that it made me better at handling my life.
If you're writing in the mainstream... Whatever that is - the norm. The norm is likely going to be funded because you're giving people what they're used to and what they're gonna get. But anything outside of that norm is going to struggle to get funded. The people who are not "the norms" deserve the chance to make art. I think it's great for all of us to consume all these voices, and that happens when you support these voices that need to be supported because they're not the automatic choice coming out of the gate.
If I even tell anything false, within one minute I have to come clean. And I think most people, even if they're not that direct, it comes out in indirect ways. If somebody cheats on you, they end up telling you they've been spending all this time hanging out with that person. Why? Because nobody can bear a lie. A lie won't stay silent. It makes noise.
The first thing a fascist regime does is burn books. To not have them around would mean to make sure they're not written in the first place.
Chloë Moretz as Carrie has an inherent amount of charisma, the camera loves her, she's been acting since she's five, she's a total pro, she knows her instrument. I took her on this phenomenal journey from a confident child star who has the great privileges of a family who loves her, great success, and huge confidence, to a wounded woman who had to gain her confidence back and desperately wanted love and acceptance.
In The Shining, you love Shelley Duvall. You love Jack Nicholson. You're let into the intimacy of that violence and it's emotional and it's physical. We're let in very close. So I think a good horror film has to pull you in very deeply inside. Halloween is a good horror film because we love Jamie Lee Curtis, we're brought very deeply in right when she's babysitting the kids. She's going from house to house, all those houses have windows that you can look in. We're a very vulnerable and exposed audience.
I think there are a lot of writers who would never have an opportunity to make their work. Some presses rely heavily on the NEA. Translators cannot support themselves on translating. It would be isolating artistically. It would diminish experimental output. It would have a homogenizing effect on the work that was made.
I'm a writer who doesn't much think about money because money doesn't really care about me. In other nations, art gets subsidized. Writers aren't wealthy by any means, but there's the idea that the state supports the creation of art.
Forget about Republican or Democrat - what about the kid in the middle of the country who wants to play the drums, the kid who wants to learn how to write a book, or the kid who wants to write a screenplay? We need to give them access to the arts. It's not fair that if you live in a different part of the country, you don't have the chance to learn. And it's not fair that if you don't have as much money, you don't have the chance to learn.
I am a lifelong career artist, which itself is a bit of a miracle. It's really challenging to be a career artist. I would say that the argument for grant funding is not only did my movie do some social good - hopefully it opened people's eyes - but you created a working artist. I'm hiring cinematographers, I'm hiring production designers, I'm hiring producers.
