Top 47 Quotes by Scott Derrickson

I think it's important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that's a problem. You've got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you're going to make full use of it.

If you look at life with any honesty and intelligence, it's clear that human nature is dark, vile, selfish, and despondent. But I also see a force in human nature, namely grace, that sometimes works against our natural moral entropy.

Priests and pastors are probably the most stereotyped characters in film and television, and the reason why, I think, is that most people don't know one. Most writers who work in Hollywood don't know any.

I became a Christian within a fundamentalist church. I saw 'A Thief in the Night' on a 16 mm. print when I was in the eighth grade, and I got the whole scare speech from our pastors. 'Do you want to be left here, left behind, for the Tribulation? If not, then come forward.'

There's a clean simplicity to the plotting of 'Sinister,' whether you like it or not. And the scares are deliberate and even heavy-handed in a way. There's not a lot of sophistication or nuance in the plotting and not much restraint in the scares - and that's a part of what makes the movie accessible.

I can't imagine making something that is made only to be scary. For me, the darkness and scary material has to have meaning attached to it, or I can't invest the time and energy it takes to write and script or make a movie. It has to mean something.

I'm not standing above the audience trying to manipulate them as a puppet master or a trickster; I'm inside the story I'm writing and making and thinking about things very seriously and feeling very deeply at times, and trying to translate that into a narrative.

When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.