My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'

I love Hitchcock movies. I took a Hitchcock class in college, so I saw all his movies. I wrote papers on his movies.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

The model we established was to give creative people complete creative freedom in exchange for betting on themselves, so they work for the minimums you're allowed to work for, and if the movies work in a big way, everyone does very well. If the movies don't, nobody loses too much money. The benefit to doing all the movies low budget is we can tell different types of stories and take creative risks. The Purge would have been irresponsible to do for $20M, but to do it for $3M makes sense.

The scares are the easier part of scary movies. The hard part of scary movies is what leads up to the scares.

I think the mistake people make with horror movies and what makes them successful is a lot of horror movies get made by people who don't really like them, so they don't respect them. And when you like horror and have admiration for it, that community knows that what's important for a horror movie is important for every other kind of movie.

You can't be a creative person and not fall in love with everything. Every movie I've made there's a complicated, twisted love affair with.