There's nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.

If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.

If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.

I'm the freaky version of that superhero who says, wherever there is injustice, I shall be there. Whenever there is a difficult project, I'd like to be there.

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It’s like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it’s gorgeous. You feel very exposed.

When you shoot in America, you have huge beams of sunlight in the windows, very vivid sunlight - it's faster in a way.

I always thought what if you took a myth of childhood like the tooth fairy and made it a central scary thing. We did it on Hellboy and we did it on 'Don't be afraid of the dark'.