It's very flattering to feel like you actually helped create a sub-genre.

I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.

When I was filming the death scene [in Inglourious Basterds], and I'm killing somebody, I had to work myself up.

The best movies now are called 'thrillers.' Because if you use the word 'horror,' people's associations are straight-to-video crap.

I think in a post-9/11 world, with the images coming back from Iraq, everybody knows more and more people who are going over there... the images on the YouTube phenomenon where the violence is so immediate. Direct people need something stronger to respond to. I think that there's definitely a wave of directors - who are labelled the splat pack - who really, really care about making great scary movies.

I've always wanted to be involved in an exorcism movie. But I thought, "How do you make something scarier than The Exorcist?" The answer is you don't. But that doesn't mean you can't make something that is original and interesting.

Quentin Tarantino faced the same backlash when his films came out until eventually people felt they were actually much smarter.