My goal from the very beginning was to make very visually lush, juicy films that you can really sink your teeth into. That's always been part of my modus operandi.
I love to choose the right actors. It's kind of a pleasure to work with them and watch them imbue your concepts that you write.
I think the first music I ever heard was Abba. I took my mother's cassette recorder and went into the bushes to listen to Abba when I was four or five-years-old.
Well, I think if you're telling a story, a three act structure will just naturally emerge out of it. But I also love it when a film doesn't feel like it's anchored too rigidly to that structure and you feel like anything could happen.
Well I don't think of myself as like a horror or science fiction filmmaker. I just think of myself as a filmmaker.
My mother died in 1997 and I spiralled into this self-destructive vortex of trying to annihilate my consciousness. I was afraid to face the grief of losing her, because she was somebody I loved more than anybody else in the world.
I was, like, 'I really wanna see an Eric Rohmer movie take place in a Bert I. Gordon universe.' Where there's a story going on that's about, you know, loss and desire, but with a giganticized-animal element.
We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.
A lot of films mistake convolutedness for complexity. To me, a simple story can be a powerful spine to build around.
Black Rainbow' is about control and your emotions being repressed and controlled, and 'Mandy's' about all a volcanic eruption!
I just find there's nothing funnier and more scary than a delusional man who thinks they're the center of the universe, and in fact they're not.
The way I work is I'll basically become kind of fixated on a very stripped-down genre, like revenge or something like that, and just start layering on top of that and entering in thoughts and ideas, and then the story just kind of builds up that way.
If I'm going to sell out, I'm going to sell out all the way, so a bid by the studio would be if you're going to go through the pain of trying to make a film, it's gotta be worth it.
I try to look at the films as I make them from a distance, in a way. I think of them as kind of pop culture artefacts. I'll often make posters and tag lines as I'm working on them, and not just conceive of them as a story I'm going to tell, but as a whole, a piece - a whole object that exists in the pop culture realm.