James Wan Quotes

There's this film called 'The Pledge', with Jack Nicholson in it. Now that's a dark film.

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film.

With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.

Lie to Me' is one of the smartest shows on TV. We have something different, unique and new to say to the audience that they're not going to get from any other show.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

I love 'Shattered Glass.' It's one of my favorite movies. I think it's just brilliant.

Hey, any time you're throwing bodies over board it is to save yourself.

When I think of 'Nightmare on Elm Street,' there was a warmth to those teenagers that I related to. They were not aware that they were in the middle of a horror film, and I really loved those characters and I empathized with them.

I like all of the mental, psychological thriller movies too. I enjoy horror movies across the board.

I'd love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction.

What I get really excited about are movies that I connect with emotionally. 'Deliverance' was on TV, and they don't really make movies like that anymore, just simple and scary. The truly scary thing is, 'I'm going to threaten your life, I'm going to threaten the people you love. What are you going to do about it?'

For me, it's very easy to write a horror movie that's just a succession of scary sequences, but it's hard to find horror movies that have a genuine theme to them that are really exploring some aspect of our psychology and our fears.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.

We're all caught up in circumstances, and we're all good and evil. When you're really hungry, for instance, you'll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing - well, maybe that's too strong - but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

'Rosemary's Baby' is a real New York movie, even though you wouldn't necessarily think of it as one, though I do.

'Belko Experiment' was the harshest, most extreme movie I ever made. But I still think there's a very cohesive center to it that wasn't always in my early films. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I think it's a commercial thing.

The reason to do any barking - well, the reason for me - is that 'Three Billboards' feels so off about so many things. It's one of those movies that really do think they're saying something profound about human nature and injustice.

'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.

I think the 'Saw' universe, the 'Saw' brand, is too big to just let it just sit there on a shelf.

By the time I got to 'Silence of the Lambs,' I was madly in love with close-ups because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of 'Silence of the Lambs' is the story about two people fighting their way into each other's heads.