M. Night Shyamalan
I try to take B genre movies and treat them as if they're A dramas. Get the cinematographers, get the actors to do an A drama, but it just happens to be about aliens or ghosts or crazy people, or killers, or whatever it is.Collection: Drama
I love 'The Killing', I love 'Homeland' and 'Mad Men', all those shows that lean into the tone of things.Collection: Men
Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.Collection: Writing
My directing style is long takes. The longer take I can do, the more I can think of not doing it in cuts, the better.Collection: Cutting
My philosophy is to make movies with the biggest possible budget that will allow it to be made in an independent fashion.Collection: Fashion
I'm so from the Woody Allen/Spike Lee school.Collection: School
Filmmakers have to find the right materials to match their [voice].Collection: Voice
There are scenes that were right on the edge, but I always try to err on non-indulgence. It's something that I'm very careful about, that I'm just leaning too hard into something.Collection: Trying
People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.Collection: Two
Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.Collection: Darkness
The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.Collection: Real
A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors.Collection: Character
I think one of my favorite things about making low budget movies is that when you get into expensive moviemaking territory, it's almost impossible not to reverse engineer the movies. It's irresponsible not to think about the result and the financial result. But when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head.Collection: Thinking
The muscles that writers need for film are very different from TV muscles. Now, when I hire the writers and put the writers' room together, I know where their muscles need to be.Collection: Together
I always thought I was going to be the film guy until I died.Collection: Guy
You're saying, "I'm gonna do this thing," and you have to be aware, as a rational human being, that you may not be allowed back in.Collection: May
Great actors come with depth about how their character sees the world, and they completely defend it. They could defend it in a court of law, down to the reason the patient deserved this.Collection: Character
Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying.Collection: Writing
I'm so consistent that my director's cuts are usually 20-25 minutes longer than the released version of the movies.Collection: Cutting
You don't have your film finished when you have your director's cut finished. It's just a bunch of green screen.Collection: Cutting
This is the problem with being Indian. It's hard to be one of the family members. Everybody is white usually [in the movie].Collection: White
One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you don't have to think about that as much. You can have more fun and be more playful and be freer creatively.Collection: Fun
I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.Collection: Pilots
You don't want to watch classics with me 'cause I'm constantly writing notes.Collection: Writing
My grandparents were classic Indian grandparents. My grandmother would put so much powder on her face that it was like a Kabuki play and she'd come down the stairs. I was like 8 or 9 years old. My grandfather apparently had no teeth because he would take out his teeth and put them in a glass, and then he would try to scare me with it. I started to try to scare them when I was a little older.Collection: Grandmother
I'm super confident about creative stuff, and I'm really not confident about human interactions stuff.Collection: Creative
I'm from that world where I feel so comfortable making small independent movies.Collection: Independent
As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.Collection: Children
I wouldn't describe myself as a do-gooder. That's really more my wife. I'm kind of just the obsessed guy who's been writing and making movies since I was a little kid, just in a room and make it.Collection: Writing
Saw # Birdman . Such singular, audacious filmmaking. Can't stop thinking about the ending.Collection: Thinking
I think I take what you might call a B-movie story, deal with B-movie subjects, and I treat it as if it's an A-movie in terms of my approach, my crew, my actors, my ethics and so on. I guess that's my trademark or one of them anyway!Collection: Thinking
People who come to see my movies, you're coming to see a drama masquerading as a genre piece.Collection: Drama
The beauty is that we can blur film and TV a little bit more.Collection: Littles
Most of the time, I don't watch classics with anybody. I have to be by myself. That's my classroom.Collection: Watches
I had a desire to do TV and wanted to get in, in the right way, knowing that I was going to learn a lot, along the way.Collection: Knowing
I consider myself an independent filmmaker.Collection: Independent
The whole world makes comic book movies now.Collection: Book
I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.Collection: Opportunity
I want to make a bunch of small movies. I'm really interested in that for me in the future.Collection: Want
I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. I draw them out and do them.Collection: Thrillers