People think you're like The Godfather, waiting for scripts to come in. But, you're hustling, you're desperate, you're panicked and you're horrified. The movie you think you're going to do next, you don't do. The movie you think you're never going to do, you make.

But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.

The idea for me is that if the movie connects with you the way I want it to connect with you, you should be experiencing both the horror and the wonder as a child would. From a child's point of view. When we're kids, brutality registers differently than when we are adults. Because as adults, we get too used to violence.

I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books, but I'd love to do one where one of the kids dies, or one of the main characters dies. I love for those things to have a little bit more tragedy.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that's the route I usually want to go.

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.