I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much, and to kind of look to where your vision is going now. But I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one, because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in. Feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material.

People who are kind of at the cutting edge of life and survival, and being near the nitty-gritty, like my films, and I like that.

But I made him the Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security because that added an element of political espionage.

It's quite rare that you make something and think that you did something that no-one else had done.

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 wasn't allowed to see movies when I was a child. It was against the religion I was raised in, Fundamentalist Baptist. I didn't go into a commercial movie house until I was a senior in college, and that was on the sly. It wasn't until I was in graduate school that I immersed myself in films. Then, I went to see all the films by Bergman, Fellini, etc.

Many, many things are dangerous in our world, commercials and TV are dangerous, and so is the world of sitcoms. But nobody does anything about them because they're turning in alot of money.