I’m such an action movie junkie that as an action fan, because action scenes are so heightened, we could never really picture ourselves in that scene. So when you’re watching an action movie, you experience an action movie more outside of the aquarium: you know you’re out of the aquarium looking in at all the swimming fish that are in there. – James Wan
The ‘Saw’ sequels went in a direction I wouldn’t have gone in. With ‘Insidious 2,’ I wanted to push a potential franchise in the direction I thought it should go in. – James Wan
I believe in spirits. I believe in faith. I believe in spirituality. I believe in aliens as well. – James Wan
You may not quite understand the cinematic tricks that go behind the making of a film, but as long as you feel it, I think that’s the important thing. – James Wan
I think before ‘Saw’ came along, there really wasn’t a movie franchise that actually went out there and said, ‘We’re going to come out with one every year during Halloween and make that our trademark.’ – James Wan
There’s two aspects of film crafting that I’m very strict about, and that’s how I move my camera and where I cut the film. – James Wan
‘Saw,’ in many ways, was like my student film. The first crappy student film you don’t really want people to see. – James Wan
For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It’s not just visual, it’s audio as well. It’s emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters. – James Wan
Making a movie with people of all different ethnicity, all different skin color and different backgrounds, meant that the movie can literally play all around the world. It’s not just a blanket whitewash film like most Hollywood films tend to be. – James Wan
One of the things I learned very early on is you need to cast the kids for the characters you want them to play. They need to be who they are, right? If you want a loud, boisterous kid character, you need to find that kid. – James Wan
People used to always complain that horror films have no stories, that it’s all just about kills and stuff like that. – James Wan
I use myself as the barometer to gauge what is scary. I like to think if something scares me, then there’s a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. – James Wan
‘The Exorcist’ is one of the finest movies ever made, and it just so happens to be a scary movie. – James Wan
I’m a student of cinema in general, not just of one particular genre. So it was very important to me and to my soul to go out and do something different. – James Wan
I’m terrified of the supernatural things, which is why I’m very grateful that I don’t see things like that. Because if I did see things of the paranormal persuasion, I don’t think I’d be able to continue making scary movies. – James Wan
Language-wise, my mom and dad’s dialect, they’re pretty obscure. It’s Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn’t something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house. – James Wan
‘Poltergeist’ was really the film that really scarred, but fascinated, me with puppets and dolls, clowns and stuff like that. – James Wan
My low-budget films, more than anything, taught me that you’ve got to create cool, likable characters and great stories because, if you don’t, it doesn’t matter how cool it might look – no one is going to care about it. – James Wan
When I was a kid, my grandfather used to watch Bollywood films. There’s a lot of colour and vibrancy to the Indian films. – James Wan