I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.

I did have the resource of having taught Greek mythology and the history of Western civilization, and you can go back into the plays of Aeschylus and follow what happens when people seek revenge, and there are people plucking their eyes out. And Greek mythology is filled with all kinds of monsters and whatnot.

I realized that I really, almost by accident, had fallen into a labyrinthine, very powerful paradigm for dealing with these things through genre films. And once I realized that and realized the power of it, and the fact that because horror films aren't, in general, studio products - studios back them sometimes, but they don't try to meddle too much, because they kind of don't want to sully their skirts - you have a lot of freedom.

The first monster that an audience has to be scared of is the filmmaker. They have to feel in the presence of someone not confined by the normal rules of propriety and decency.

I came from a very strict background. [So if you want to make a scary movie] if you were raised as a fundamentalist, just pull all the skeletons out of your closet.

You can look at what's happened to America in the last years and say a lot of people were asleep. A lot of people were not staying awake and watching what was going on and facing the pain of that and dealing with it.I don't care if the rest of the audience doesn't think along those lines at all, because the audience is a huge spectrum of people, from people who are introspective to people who just want to be scared and have fun, and all the points in between.