“As great as Ed is, the wisdom out here is that he can't carry a movie. They'll pay him $3 million to be the second banana in Julia Roberts things. But they won't put up $3 million for an Ed Harris movie.”
“A lot of people say my work borrows from Hitchcock, but I think if I've stolen... of COURSE I've stolen, this is a parasitic medium... but if I'm parasitic of anyone it's Welles, and Michael Pal and Kazan... those are my guys. The James Whale stuff... I LOVE the old B&W movies, like classic paintings.”
“It's a lot harder to do anything that's that edgy 'cause the execs don't wanna hear about it... but we're trying to raise some European money and see if we can get a low budget together.”
“Pictures that test great go out and go in the toilet. And pictures that test poorly, all of a sudden they'll come out of the pack and people like them, but they don't get a chance because a studio won't really get behind it if it tests poorly. It's a mess. I mean, it's really a mess.”
“I didn't play practical jokes at home. I had a strict upbringing, which is part of my rebellion. I was raised Catholic and went to parochial school, which is why priests and nuns appear in my movies a lot, and I don't have very much nice to say about them.”
“I like having to use ingenuity... When I'm pitching ideas, I say hey guys, the real scary stuff doesn't need the big bucks... things that go bump in the night... you can scare someone without spending a lot of money.”
“I never liked the Friday The 13th movies, or any of that. It's just not my bag. It's a genre that I guess current audiences haven't seen in a while, or haven't seen at all. I have a 14-year-old daughter, and the first one of those she ever watched, she only watched because of peer pressure.”