I have no rules, |
I remember somebody saying to Joel Schumacher about one of his Batman movies, 'Isn't that over the top?' ... And he said, 'Well, nobody pays to see under the top.' I wish I could just say that. But I think you learn something when you go to extremes. |
I should add that Kerry won our election. |
I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film. |
I wasn't interested in abstracting violence, |
I wrote a script that I thought had a lot of potential, |
I've been to screenings where people laugh at certain points and can see that they are entertained. But this movie is the furthest thing from ironic. If you are entertained, if you laugh, I hope you would ask yourself why. I would hope to make a movie in which the audience questions everything. |
I've launched a lot of films here. |
I've managed, really, to be pretty successful in terms of getting what I want in a movie. I leave people very happy with what we've done, even when I end up getting what I wanted and they don't get what they wanted. |
if you want the exhilaration of seeing the bad guys go down, then you have to accept the consequences. |
In a weird way, |
It is specifically American, ... but that's not to say it's not universal. And I'm not fudging it. It is a parable of art that, to be universal, you must be specific. Otherwise, you are just talking about an abstraction. So you have to talk about a particular person and a particular place. Specificity is the essence of art. But it doesn't mean it doesn't have universal resonance. |
It's a funny movie, too. People may wonder what's going on when they hear that about a movie that has the title A History of Violence . I think once they see it, they'll get it. |
It's almost Twilight Zone y. There's an appeal to that longing for an imaginary pasta yearning for an innocence that was never so pure anyway. It's meant to be recognizably real, but it has to play as mythological as well. That's part of the balancing act. |
It's not as though I have a message . . . I haven't solved any problem. It's a discussion, it's a meditation on the complexity of it. |