I can say that I put a lot of personal feelings into 'Hereditary', though I can also say that none of the characters in the film are surrogates for anybody in my family or for myself.
'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film, whereas 'It Comes at Night' was a lot of things: it was a thriller; it was a postapocalyptic drama. It was a slow-building, very dark movie about relationships. 'Hereditary' is also about relationships, and I hope it functions as a vivid family drama, but it is also very much a horror film.
In some ways, the audience becomes complacent when they go to a horror film. And so it's fun to take that attitude and then to upend it.
It's easy for me to write a horror movie about real stuff because my mind is always going there anyway.
The nice thing about a horror movie is that people go in looking to be unsettled.
You get so lost in the making of a film, and you get so fixed on just, like, every tiny detail. If something doesn't hit the bullseye in the way you wanted, you become obsessed with that, and you get so just lost in that maze of neurotic thinking.
If people felt that they were misled with 'It Comes at Night,' they should know that the marketing here is deliberately misleading you in an honest way, in that we're not hiding what isn't there: we're hiding what is there.
My first experience in a movie theater was Dick Tracy. There was a scene with a guy with a Tommy gun and a wall of fire behind him. I panicked, screamed, and jumped out of my seat. And I ran six New York city blocks, running into the street and almost got hit by a bunch of cars and had my mom chasing after a panic-stricken four-year-old.
I found that the things I am afraid of most are things for which there are no obvious remedies. Like, what do you do with a fear of death? You either come to terms with it or you don't, but there's no solving it.
I like to play with transgression and upending conventions, and I like the idea of rooting genre films in character.
I'm very impressed by films like' Whiplash' or what Fincher does, where you get all these different... Where you get all this coverage that's perfectly linked up. I actually find coverage very confusing. But I love sequencing shots because I know exactly where I am.
The way I work is, I always compose a shot list before I talk to anybody, including my DP. So I'll spend a couple months basically creating the movie in my head, so I have a very solid film in my head, where I know every shot, and I know what the transitions between scenes are.
I love Lars von Trier. 'Dogville' is my favourite movie of the last 20 years. 'Nymphomaniac' and 'Melancholia' aren't quite as exciting as 'The Kingdom', 'Breaking the Waves', or 'The Idiots', but I'll always love him for being him.
The idea of witches has always scared me because of the idea that there are Machiavellian forces out there that conspire to hurt others. There are people who do not have your best interest at heart and are actively willing to do harm to you and actively sending energy in that direction.
