I found myself in this conundrum of loving acting, but not liking the path that you have to take to do it. I was just never good at auditioning, so basically I decided I would just write my own stuff and if I could get a role in it, then fine.

I think true connectivity is something that is rare in sequels. I mean I love the first 'Die Hard' film; you won't find a bigger 'Die Hard' fan than me. But I feel like with the sequels, they're just taking that character and dropping him in different scenarios. There's no real connective tissue.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

That's what I love about writing is you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You can just get up in the morning, grab a pad and pen and start writing.

I'm still a big believer in movie theaters, and going to see movies in public.

A lot of low-budget genre films you see are horror movies, because horror is the friendliest movie to lack of money.

In a lot of ways knowledge kills fear. Once you know who the boogie man is, once you know what's under the bed, it can still be frightening but that fear of the unknown is gone.

I love, and I've always loved, contained sci-fi films that utilize practical effects. I feel like the human eye can tell when something is actually in the frame and when it was inserted digitally later.

Maybe I'm a product of my era, but I just enjoy the practical effects of 'The Thing' more than CGI aliens.

Prior to 'Insidious Chapter 3,' I was happy to write movies for James Wan to direct as I felt very much that I was one half of a duo. I looked at us as a team who works together and I was happy to be part of that, I was happy to effectively be the bass player in The Beatles.

Well you know, the big trick with 'Saw,' the sleight of hand that you have to pull off is that - spoiler alert - the bad guy, the antagonist, is right there in front of your face, literally.

When I was a kid, 'Robocop' to me was just good guys and bad guys.

You know, by the time you get to the fourth film in a franchise you're really mining for something different. You're really looking for a way to go about things that the audience hasn't already seen.

I like pointing the camera at the actors and letting them fight. Don't let the camera do the fighting for you, and don't let the camera give them the adrenaline hit. Let the people in the frame do that.

That's one of the great things about creativity. You labor away in a room, and when you're writing a film, it couldn't be more of a solitary activity or a lonelier job, but if you then write a film that gets made and goes out into the world, it kind of flies away from you. It's not yours anymore.

I always say that the horror genre and the comedy genre are close cousins because they are the two genres where you are attempting to elicit an involuntary vocal response from a crowd of people and you instantly know whether it's working or not.

A lot of the fear about being a first-time director is just starting with a completely blank slate and thinking: 'Is this going to connect with anybody?'

After 'Saw,' we got offered every horror remake under the sun, and I was just always thinking, 'I don't see how this could be interesting for me.'

A lot of times when a film is a success, the fans of that film take ownership of it - it becomes their property.

I will say that when it comes to the horror genre, for me, the scariest thing is when something is actually in the frame.

If I'm going to live in Sydney, I want to live on Bondi Beach.

It's a weird little anomaly about horror films in that the more money and noise you have, the less scary it gets.

I love watching audiences scream.

I feel like with the first 'Insidious' film we had a massive cache of stories and scares that we'd built up over the years. It was like a band, you know they say a band has forever to write their first album because no one cares.

The problem with acting is that there's really no control. You're at the behest of others.

Somewhere along the way, the ability to make terrifying big budget films like 'The Exorcist' or 'The Shining' was lost, and I don't know if we'll ever get it back.

I don't know if I can see myself writing another 'Saw' film. It's such a special part of my life, and I almost don't want to ruin it by going back.

I always want to fulfill genre expectations and think that should be the bedrock of any film - then you can layer in thematics.

Creating 'Upgrade' was really something I enjoyed even though it was stressful. I would do it all again.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

The thing I love the most about low budget films is the creative freedom.

Every now and again, something will pop into my head when I'm driving or I'm in the shower, you'll just get an image and it stays with you. It doesn't have to be much, it doesn't have to be a story, it could just be an image. But it won't leave your head and that's when you know you've got something.

What I feel like science fiction fans respond to is just people trying to hit them with something new, something they haven't seen. And if you do that you'll be okay.

I remember when James Wan and I did the first 'Saw' movie, a lot of people would say to us, 'Well, you left the door open for a sequel.' And we would say, 'No, we literally closed the door!' We thought it was a nice ending. Little did we know that the producers had other ideas once the film was a hit.

The most fun part of making a horror movie is watching it with an audience.

The great thing about 'The Exorcist' is it's dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it's a documentary style.

Australia, most of the filmmakers there write a film and they direct it. There's a lot of writer/directors there, because nobody wants to write a script and then let it go when they've had that much of a personal investment to it, because you're not getting paid huge amounts of money in Australia to direct.

I think that's the problem, when you're a young filmmaker and you're starting out, you don't know people, you're easily lead, you don't know the right people to talk to, you really need guides.

I don't think humor is something to be afraid of.

I really liked that documentary, 'Room 237.'

James Wan is somebody who doesn't have any problem coming in and directing somebody else's script, he'll be the director for hire and he has his own style and he loves that.

The good thing with 'Insidious' and 'The Further' is that it's so nebulous, this supernatural world, that it allows you to bend things. There's a lot of room, it's very malleable, like how in the second film we had a lot of time travel.

The good thing about directing a screenplay that you've written is that you see the film in your head as you're writing it and then you see those decisions through to the end.

I'd always had this romantic idea, ever since I've been writing scripts, that I would travel one day and pull up stumps, as we say in Australia. It's a cricket reference. You can Google it. Pull up stumps in some country like Italy or Spain and do my little Truman Capote thing.

If you have a year where a few good horror films come out, all of the sudden, horror is back and everyone's talking about how it's a vintage year for horror.

If you look back at a film like 'Dawn of the Dead' - You can either watch it as a straight-up genre film and have fun with zombies being shot, or you can look at it as a metaphor for consumerism. Or a metaphor for the Vietnam war.

It's always an interesting experience with the 'Saw' films, when a sequel comes out that I didn't have anything to do with, creatively, because here's this idea, this story, and this character that I created for James Wan, but now it doesn't need me anymore.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to paint myself as, you know, the evangelist for practical effects or some sort of anti CG guy because it's really a tool. Like filmmaking is this toolbox and you use what's appropriate in relation to the story.

For me in a horror film, just looking down a long corridor and seeing somebody standing there, the simplest thing in the world, has a really seismic impact to me.

Saw' was a film that James Wan and I came up with back in Australia and we were just hoping anyone, literally, anyone would make that film and if nobody would give us the money we were going to shoot it in a garage somewhere.