I just really like seeing mundane stuff in movies. It's realistic.

That's what's interesting about people. It can be funny, but when [John] Travolta got there and did [comic moments] you're like, "Oh! This is really funny." Or when Karen [Gillan] and Taissa [Farmiga] do something, I'm like, "This came out so much funnier."

I always feel like the less you say when you're making a movie, as a director, is the best. That means everything's going great.

If you ever see the director pulling people aside, that means something's not working. Because you're trying to figure out why it's not working. But we would show up, we would talk about it.

It's very important to me to find ways to relate the audience to the characters. This is the first thing to go in most mainstream horror films.

The movie [ The Innkeepers] is in no way a comedy, but I would put some of the funny scenes up against some of the funnier comedies this year. I think it's genuinely really funny, but it's out of the gallows.

Of course, we talked about Westerns we like with [James Ransone in Valley of Violence] , but it was always thematically in relation to the movie and what the themes of the movie were.