- I'm usually not quite aware of what my influences are until I'm in post-production and I say "Oh, that must have been lodged in my unconscious and this must have been in the back of my head." I try to be pretty open with the movies that I love and the films that have been important to me. But I try to never draw from things too consciously or self-consciously.
- I think it was probably the time I was eight, maybe seven, that I knew that I wanted to be making movies. I've been obsessed with movies since I was first introduced to them.
- I try to avoid traditional coverage wherever I can, and I like to draw shots out as long as I can without it becoming indulgent or distracting. I really love shot sequencing, and I map out the blocking and what the camera is doing in relation to the blocking long before production. I typically get really involved with camera movement.
- Making films for me is just like this horribly prolonged grieving process of having to make compromises. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're huge.
- In shooting, you're racing. Like, if you get stuck on one shot, then you're compromising all the other shots you could do that day. So you can get it as close to perfect as you can. And then some shots you have to move on and you didn't get it the way you wanted. And that's a tiny tragedy, and then you carry that weight to the next one.
- As you're making short films and learning how to do it, you rip everybody off and make extremely derivative work and find what works for you and what doesn't. After a while, you forget about who you're copying and you find your own style, which ends up being a Frankenstein's monster of all the things that you loved growing up and all the things you connected with.
- When people ask if I consider myself a horror director, I'll be quick to respond with a very clear no, absolutely not. Because there are so few horror films that for me live up to what the genre can do. That epidemic has given the genre a bad name. It's one of those genres that, if its virtues are being effectively exploited, can be just the most amazing experience in a theater. When they work, I get very excited.
- [on Midsommar (2019)] I don't really care about managing expectations. People can react however they like. I think it's better to enter the film without any knowledge. But it's a movie that is adhering to the laws of a certain subgenre, folk horror, but with the logic of a different genre, a fairy tale. How do you turn a folk horror film into a fairy tale?
- I love movies, I love genre, and I always find the most exciting way into any given genre is sideways. I typically like to think outside of the genre I'm dealing in.
- I usually find that writing comes easiest to me when I'm in a crisis. It becomes a tool for digging myself out of the crisis. Or at least navigating it. Otherwise, I'm just torturing myself.
- I avoid a lot of horror films because so many of them are produced so cynically. There are always exceptions to that. I think South Korea has been producing incredible genre films for the last ten years, and not just in the horror genre.
- My method of writing women is just to put myself in them, and then I feel that if I put enough of myself into these characters, they'll feel real to me, and hopefully they will feel real to other people.
- I think I might have a signature style with my long takes and sort of the way I like to block the actors and move the camera, but I'm not quite sure what that is; I wouldn't be able to point it out or explain it.
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