I'm a big fan of cel animation, I'm a big fan of computer animation, and, most of all, I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation.

I try to pull my inspirations from everyday life. If I came across a situation that is like, 'Oh, that's going to be scary, that's going to be frightening,' that's when I get inspired, and I put that into my films.

My first film out of the gate was financially so successful that I guess, being in Hollywood, you get kind of put into a certain box.

I love 'MacGyver.'

I'm a big fan of the 'Fast' franchise. I remember when I met Neal Moritz early on, I joked if Justin Lin ever left the franchise, I would be the perfect guy to slip right in and take over, and no one would know the difference.

I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do. There's something about creating life out of things that have no life.

I'm always excited when I can discover new filmmakers.

I want to start off making the kinds of films that I loved growing up as a kid. Fun horror films that are scary but at the same time, after you finish the movie, it leaves you excited to see more.

You can only go by the instinct that you have.

It kind of irks me that the studio films still have to be so safe even though they don't really cost as much to make.

It's actually smarter to make a dumb film.

As a filmmaker, you aspire to want to make movies that can hopefully stand the test of time, but you never know when that will happen or if that will happen.

I thought the marketing was really smart and really clever and unique at the time. It positioned 'Saw' as a horror film that was different from the other horror films that were in the crowded marketplace.

I think the 'Saw' universe, the 'Saw' brand, is too big to just let it just sit there on a shelf.

'Saw' really came from that want, the aspiration to make a feature film on our own.

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.

I use myself as the barometer to gauge what is scary.

'Saw' was good and bad. It was good in that it gave me a career start, but it was also negative in that it really marginalized me as a filmmaker.

You can never have too much good blessing.

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.

The stuff I'm designing, I want my action scenes to be intense.

People are so used to seeing John Goodman as a loveable dad or the quirky characters he played in the Coen Brothers films.

I am my own worst critic, and I look at 'Death Sentence' now, and I go, 'Oh wow, I have really come a long way.' In terms of a filmmaker, I feel like my filmmaking language has really matured.

I love my genre films, but I think when I get older, the way I tell it will be very different to how I told it when I was in my mid-twenties, which is how old I was when I made the first 'Saw.'

There's something very cool about that indie spirit that I try to hang on to even now with the bigger films that I'm working on.

So many movies get made, and so many go to VOD, which is a market I admire.

Geoff Johns is super talented, super smart. Part of what got me excited about the Aquaman character is his re-envisioning of Aquaman, the character, with 'The New 52.'

I've made one action movie. But nobody saw it, so I guess that doesn't count for most people.

I think I'm a very sentimental person. Conscious or not, that's what draws me to the kind of films I want to make.

I try to keep the number of projects I'm involved in down to one per year.

To some degree, this re-release is to let people remember what the first 'Saw' film was, and let them know there was a time in the 'Saw' history where it wasn't all about blood and traps.

Whatever it is that makes your movie unique is something you should embrace.

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.'

I'd love to be a filmmaker and look back and be like, 'Ah, man, we were part of that whole '80s video nasty thing!'

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian would have left little more than lipstick stains in their passing had it not been for the sex videos that lofted them into reality-TV notoriety. Once notoriety has warmed into familiarity, celebrity itself becomes one big 'Brady Bunch' reunion, or a therapy session with Dr. Drew.

A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.

Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel.

Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Stars wide of belt often cultivated a gentlemanly grandeur, a groomed refinement that filtered through their fingertips - the dainty fidgets of Hardy's plump digits, Orson Welles performing magic tricks with nimble dexterity, Jackie Gleason lofting a teacup to his lips as if he were Lady Bracknell - or through a fine set of twinkle-toes.

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.

With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers.

In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'

If you were to hold me down and tickle me to pick my favorite 'plus-comic,' it would have to be Kevin James, a broad physical pratfaller capable of deadpan underplay, a technique honed from years of reaction-shot close-ups on TV, where every teeny fraction of a squint registers.

Slashing its way to the finish line, 'Black Swan' is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.