If you look at life with any honesty and intelligence, it's clear that human nature is dark, vile, selfish, and despondent. But I also see a force in human nature, namely grace, that sometimes works against our natural moral entropy.
Scott Derrickson
I'm married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that - in screenplays or movies that I've worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won't know the difference.
Flannery O'Connor is my creative hero. I think she's the greatest American writer. Her book, 'Mystery and Manners,' is my creative bible.
I think that the secular work environment in general is a place that's challenging for Christians to thrive in without getting caught up in materialism or in competitiveness or in things that are really not important.
Priests and pastors are probably the most stereotyped characters in film and television, and the reason why, I think, is that most people don't know one. Most writers who work in Hollywood don't know any.
You know, 'Top Gun' was the movie I saw in high school that made me want to be a filmmaker. I remember very specifically coming out of the Century 21 Theater in Colorado from seeing it, and my friend saying, 'What did you think of the movie?' And I said, 'I think I know what I want to do for a living.' That's a true story.
I grew up reading comics - mostly Marvel - Doctor Strange was my favourite comic book and has remained my favourite as an adult. It's the only comic book movie property I've ever gone after. I felt uniquely suited to it.
I don't fear pain or failure anymore because I'm too grateful for the pains and failures of my past - they have made me who I am, and most of the good things in my life are a direct result of them in some way.
Some of the most intelligent people I've met in my life are priests and pastors; now, a lot of them aren't that, though. Some of the most sanctimonious and hypocritical people I've met are priests and pastors, also.
I think that Christians who have an interest in filmmaking need to deepen their love for cinema. To be honest, that's what I think has been missing historically from the Christians who want to succeed in the Hollywood industry.
When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.
I have friends who are scientists, strict materialists, who don't think science and religion are compatible, but I just think most of us - unless you're a strict atheist materialist, which there aren't many of - most of us believe in something outside the material world. And if you do believe that, I don't know how you're not obsessed with it.
Interestingly enough, there is a really different dynamic when you're directing something that somebody else has written compared to when you're directing something that you've written. And there's a good and a bad side to it. I think the bad side is that you never feel the same level of connection to the material - you just don't.
I love the comics so much, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character - probably, I think honestly, the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on.
My faith sometimes burdens me with the responsibility to think very deeply and long and hard about the choices I make creatively. There are projects I turn down because the material is too much a violation of what I believe. But that's true of anybody.
I think it's important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that's a problem. You've got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you're going to make full use of it.
In my films, I either want the music to be very subtle and very buried or just put it right out in front and be super blunt with it.
I think more than comedy, probably more than straight drama, I like horror. And horror I think I'm particularly good at. It's a mistake a lot of directors make, especially young directors. They always want to make the kind of movies that they most admire and aren't necessarily sensitive to what they have the best skill set for.
My interest in the comic goes back a long time, because I grew up reading comics, mostly Marvel Comics, and I always loved 'Doctor Strange' uniquely. It was the presence of the fantastical, the presence of the supernatural that was in it. The idea of magic.
My understanding of religion and science is that they're both arrogant schools of thought, and whether they acknowledge it or not they continually broadcast the idea that they have the world figured out. And what they don't know, they have a theory for which is probably correct. It feels like that shrinks the world, rather than expands it.
In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.
The more frightening and sort of dark and oppressive a movie is, the more free you are to explore the supernatural and explore faith. The two just somehow go hand-in-hand really nicely.
We've all watched hundreds of movies from characters' points of view that are not our own. That's part of the gift movies give us.
Real Super 8 is creepy. If you went into your grandmother's attic and found her Super 8 films and watched them, I don't care what was on them, there would be something a little creepy feeling about it.
If you really look hard at the evidence, the most rational conclusion is to believe that the demonic is real.
I always liked the idea in 'Potter' that you don't choose the wand, the wand chooses you, and that relics decide when you're ready to handle them. I'm a cinephile first and a filmmaker second, and it's all swimming in the subconscious.
Kurosawa is my hero, and I've taught courses on his films, and I love what he does, and 'Rashomon' is, I think, his second greatest film after 'Ikiru.'
I would be concerned if one of my children were constantly watching nothing but horror films or indulging in gothic literature without the balance of other types of art and entertainment. I do think that's a danger.
I think the Christ-myth stories make great stories, whether it's 'The Matrix' or 'Braveheart,' they all are tapping into some kind of deep myth in our DNA, and by myth I don't necessarily mean false.
I really love horror novels, horror films, that are pointing at deeper ideas and thematic meaning. It's a way of thinking about films differently; that's what I think I like the most about it. I love the fact that's it's pointing at a more mysterious world - that the world is more of a mysterious place than we tend to let ourselves believe.
I spent a lot of my adult life overcoming fear. It was a subject I knew a lot about, and it's one of the most important and most powerful human emotions. Fear is one of the greatest driving forces in the world. So I thought I could go into the horror genre and do things differently and contribute a different point of view.
I love the horror genre for how cinematic it is. I gravitated, I think, initially, toward the horror genre because, of all the genres, I think it is the genre that is most friendly to the subject matter of faith and belief in religion.
For something to be completely evil is to be nothing. Satan has good attributes - intelligence, for instance - but they are corrupted. I cannot reconcile myself emotionally to alternative understandings of evil.
There are certainly better writers and directors than me, but I have worked very hard to earn credibility within the business as a quality writer and a good director.
I became a Christian within a fundamentalist church. I saw 'A Thief in the Night' on a 16 mm. print when I was in the eighth grade, and I got the whole scare speech from our pastors. 'Do you want to be left here, left behind, for the Tribulation? If not, then come forward.'
To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world and recognizing that there is evil within us and that we're not in control and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear.
For me, there is a basic recognition of horror as the most open doorway where the intersection of philosophical and religious ideas can come tighter.
The momentum of my creative life and intellectual growth is still the momentum of breaking out of fundamentalism. Because of that, I'm very grateful for it. But I'm also grateful that at the center of it was something that I still believe to be true - those fundamentals of faith.
Fundamentalism is rooted in fear, and it's another reason I'm interested in the horror genre, because I know the fear that fundamentalism is built upon.
I'm an orthodox Christian. When people ask me if I'm a Christian, I always want to qualify and know what they mean by that. I'm not a Republican, and I'm not right wing. I'm not a dispensationalist. I don't think the world's about to end.
The role that blood plays in Christian iconography is huge - the washing of the blood, the shedding of blood, the blood of the cross, the crucifixion, the violence of that imagery. These are horrific, and yet they are at the center of the Christian faith. There is a place where beauty and terror merge, and it's at the cross.
I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.
I've never been a materialist; I've never been somebody who believes in only what we can see and measure. I continue to be a student of religious philosophy, and I continue to take those ideas very seriously.
There's a clean simplicity to the plotting of 'Sinister,' whether you like it or not. And the scares are deliberate and even heavy-handed in a way. There's not a lot of sophistication or nuance in the plotting and not much restraint in the scares - and that's a part of what makes the movie accessible.
If we're not compelled to gain a deeper understanding of good and evil, how can we make the world a better place? How can we find ourselves at the end of our lives and know that our lives were significant? Those things would be impossibilities.
I can't imagine making something that is made only to be scary. For me, the darkness and scary material has to have meaning attached to it, or I can't invest the time and energy it takes to write and script or make a movie. It has to mean something.
The world is a more mysterious place than we admit sometimes - there is more to the world than just human evil.
I'm not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I'm always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don't see that as much as you'd think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it's scariness for scariness' own sake.
I'm not going to work outside of genre. It's going to be horror, action, or sci-fi. I don't ever really see myself being interested in movies outside of that.
I think a lot of my appreciation for the Doors' music, which I love, originates with my discovery of them through seeing 'Apocalypse Now.' It's my second favorite film of all time.
