Mike Flanagan

“I forget who said it, but there's that saying: 'Films are never finished, they're abandoned.' There's always something you think you can improve on, but I don't think you should try. George Lucas started doing it, and didn't stop. You can tinker indefinitely, and it doesn't necessarily make it better.”

“When I first started out and would go on pitch meetings, there was always this kind of eye-roll that would come with pitching a horror movie when you were dealing with the studios. Unless it was viewed as a cheap product that could turn a lot of profit, there wasn't a lot of interest in making it good.”

“I always liked the challenge of that, how to take an inanimate object and build something around it that's scary.”

“I've always been fascinated with the '60s in general.”

“Audiences have grown to equate being startled with being scared, and will complain that a movie 'isn't scary enough' if it doesn't have enough jump scares... so that means that a lot of studios will insist on shoving jump scares into a movie, regardless of character or story structure, thinking it 'makes it scarier.'”

“Gerald's Game,' we could not have made it at a studio without substantive changes to the story.”

“Audiences are savvy. You can never go wrong assuming the best of them.”

“There's nothing scarier than silence. A lot of horror movies lean on hits and score to try and create tension, which actually does the opposite. The best scares come from a desire to see the character overcome what they're dealing with in the scene. If you care about the character you'll care about the scare.”

“I'm a major NASA nerd, so I've spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.”

“It's a wonderful thing to watch an actor just act.”

“My gravity is always towards original material but 'Gerald's Game,' I read it when I was nineteen years old, I got to the end and had gooseflesh up and down my arms and the back of my neck, I put it down and said 'That's one of my favourite Stephen King novels... it's also unfilmable.'”

“I have an allergy to sequels and remakes in general.”

“In high school, I started studying movies and not reacting to them emotionally.”

“I never shoot my movies like I'm shooting 'a horror movie,' I shoot them like dramas. Dramas and then something horrible happens.”

“Audiences are embracing more and more unique material. I think they can sense the cynicism when people are just cranking something out to try to ride off the success of something else. I think they can feel it.”

“I started off making backyard movies. I think it began in fifth grade - I'd get the friends together and we'd make little home movies. I always wanted to make movies but I didn't know how. It was always something really fun to do.”

“I do not have the female experience. I don't, and I strive to understand it, but I'll never truly be able to. I don't think any men will, really.”

“For me it's about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I'm not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.”

“A viewer's imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie... try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.”

“I'm a firm believer that what you don't see is always scarier than what you do.”