You don’t get to celebrate yourself unless you risk being mocked or rejected. As an artist, you cannot play it safe. You just can’t.
Giving should be a part of your routine, just like working out, eating, and sleeping.
When you say fear of the unknown, that is the definition of fear; fear is the unknown, fear is what you do not know, and its genetically within us so that we feel safe. We feel scared of the woods because were not familiar with it, and that keeps you safe.
My biggest fear in life is to be average.
Is it possible that there are no coincidences?
When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.
There’s no staying where you were. If you’re not doing anything, your skills and point of view are atrophying.
I find it very eerie when somebody is being really polite.
I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they’re A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.
For instance, The Sixth Sense had mediocre to bad reviews. Slowly, the audience pushed it and it received critical attention.
I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.
Sometimes we do not do things that we wish to do, so others will not know that we wish to do them.
You’re never the same. You’re degrading, or you’re getting better. You don’t stay the same.
When you find your voice, your life takes on grace.
Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can’t see the bigger picture.
My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.
I love ‘The Killing’, I love ‘Homeland’ and ‘Mad Men’, all those shows that lean into the tone of things.
I’m so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.
There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It’s something that I’m very careful about, that I’m just leaning too hard into something.
Always in life bad times will lead to great times.
People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.
There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can’t. What I can’t take is when my older brother, who’s everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don’t ever want to see that look in your eyes again.
If I’m hesitant at all about an idea, then that’s not the right idea.
The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you’re playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It’s real. You’re confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.
A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what’s going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.
