It's pretty scary to know how quickly time flies.
James Wan
For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It's not just visual, it's audio as well. It's emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.
If you don't do the suspense correctly, then your jump scares are not going to work.
'Poltergeist' was really the film that really scarred but fascinated me with puppets and dolls, clowns, and stuff like that. I've always been afraid of clowns, and then my fear of puppets came around, and 'Poltergeist' was the perfect combination to scare me with a clown doll.
'Saw,' in many ways, was like my student film. The first crappy student film you don't really want people to see.
We all agreed that violence begets violence, and you can't solve issues with more violence.
If I have free time, I want to go to the beach, walk around a shopping mall, go grocery shopping. Live a little bit of life.
The size of the budget doesn't make that much of a difference because the kind of issues I have on a low budget film I I have on a big budget film as well, but they're just much bigger.
I like to think if something scares me, then there's a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. The key is creating scenarios that people can relate to.
'The Conjuring' was a massive success, and honestly, it set the bar quite high. So I was nervous about making the sequel, and I wasn't sure if it will still have the same impact as the first one did. But that's what moved me to make the sequel.
I cannot state enough how important post-production is for the success of a horror movie. You bring so much to it with the way you edit it, the way it is sound-designed, and the way the music works with it.
'Poltergeist' was really the film that really scarred, but fascinated, me with puppets and dolls, clowns and stuff like that.
Supernatural movies generally have a much more brooding pace. If you look at films like 'The Sixth Sense' or 'The Others,' it's more building up the characters and building up the situation as opposed to just opening with a big action set piece.
I loved 'Jaws.' I think that is not really a horror film, but it made me afraid of the ocean for a very long time.
Just because I make movies in the scary world doesn't mean I want to visit scary worlds.
Isn't it crazy to think that we've explored space more than we have explored the depths of our ocean? That just fires up my imagination about potential sea monsters and cool creatures, that kind of stuff.
I think, like most people, we are familiar with Aquaman. We grew up reading or watching this character on the peripheral. I was never so in depth with Aquaman as, let's say, I was with X-Men.
For me, what usually makes a horror sequence scary is the journey not the destination.
'Death Sentence' really is a throwback to the '70s style revenge drama with moments of action. It's like a contemporary 'Death Wish' with a much more thriller style storyline, but the action scenes I shot very much in the style of '70s films like 'The French Connection.'
I love Carpenter, I love Craven - these are all the classics - the Romeros of the world, but I think the biggest influence on me as a storyteller and as a filmmaker is actually Steven Spielberg. I love that even though Steven isn't known for being a horror director, he started out his career making scary movies.
There's something very cool about that indie spirit that I try to hang on to even now with the bigger films that I'm working on.
If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.
I think I should have made 'Dead Silence' as an independent movie.
If I have to point to something specific with the way I move my camera, I love to do it with a wide lens. I like to show you as much of the space as I can, even if I'm following a character.
The kind of filmmaker that I am, even my darker horror films generally are still very fun. And I think that's important for me and the kind of films I make.
I definitely love to be scared. It draws the primal side out of you.
As a director you're always so busy - you're go, go, go, you're always moving, moving, moving - so I'm not actually privy to all the weird stuff that's happening around me, but for a lot of the cast and crew, that's what I hear stories from them about weird stuff happening.
'The Exorcist' is one of the finest movies ever made, and it just so happens to be a scary movie.
For me, the sound design and the musical score is a big part of what makes scary movies work.
We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.
With 'The Conjuring,' I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.
There's a reason why Smellovision has never really taken off. And I think it's a good thing.
I grew up loving X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman.
It's good to be finally able to afford food for a change. It's good to move on from potatoes and tin soup.
The very first movie that I ever saw in a theater was 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.'
I kind of joke that creating franchises is a lot like directing pilot episodes of TV series. You set a look and feel and kind of pass it on.
'Insidious 2' is a direct continuation of the first movie. We literally pick up from where we left off at the end of the first film. And whereas the first movie is a twist on the haunted house genre, the second movie is a twist on the classic domestic thriller.
When you conceive the scene, you go, 'That is scary, right?' When you shoot it, a lot of times you're not quite sure. Hopefully what you can shoot is what your conception is.
Making a movie with people of all different ethnicity, all different skin color and different backgrounds, meant that the movie can literally play all around the world. It's not just a blanket whitewash film like most Hollywood films tend to be.
A lot of these types of films - the vigilante or revenge drama - were so popular in the '70s because there was a feeling in the culture of loss of control.
'Fast and Furious' is the only franchise that I've directed that I did not create from scratch. So it definitely was an eye-opening experience for me coming to that world. I had to be respectful of the roles that had been established by the filmmakers before me, and I was cool with that.
I'm such an action movie junkie that as an action fan, because action scenes are so heightened, we could never really picture ourselves in that scene. So when you're watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium: you know you're out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there.
Up until 'Fast and Furious 7,' every movie I've made has been a film that I've created, franchises that I've created.
No one pretty much tells me what kind of horror films to make.
'Saw' was good and bad. It was good in that it gave me a career start, but it was also negative in that it really marginalized me as a filmmaker.
The stuff I'm designing, I want my action scenes to be intense.
I hope people will like 'The Conjuring 2' because I think it is a very natural and organic progression of the first movie.
I use myself as the barometer to gauge what is scary.
Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.
It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.
