Quotes from Paul W. S. Anderson

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

If you make just hardcore horror, there's a limited audience for that. Whereas if it's horror mixed with action, I think you kinda broaden your potential fanbase.

I think for the disaster to work and the drama to work, you really need to feel like you're really in that world.

I've always seen my movies in particular as being an immersive experience. I mean, with the technology at my disposal, I've always tried to make them as immersive an experience as possible.

'Death Race' was a very modern action movie, and it used all of those modern action techniques with lots of hand-held camera, lots of punchy zooms, and lots of quick movements and quick cuts.

If you're going to ask people to pay a premium price, you have to deliver a premium product. Not enough 3D movies have delivered on that promise. People got tired of it, and that's why they started to turn their back on 3D.

I had played 'Mortal Kombat' back I arcades in London, and I loved it. I came to the movies as a genuine fan of the intellectual property, and I think that counts for a lot.

I can't remember who said, 'No film is completed, just abandoned,' but I think most filmmakers will tell you that they could endlessly fiddle with their films for the next couple of decades, you know, changing things, altering things.

Honestly, I don't think anyone confuses me with Wes Anderson. He's in his own terrific universe, but not the kind anyone would mistake for mine.

DVD ushered in this era when you had to have additional footage, deleted scenes, things like that. There was no call for that back when we were just doing VHS cassettes and LaserDiscs.

When I started working as a writer-director, that's when he became Paul Thomas Anderson and I became Paul W.S. Anderson. Neither of us can write and direct an American movie under the name Paul Anderson.

If you work with a subject matter beloved by a hardcore fan base, then there's going to be a huge amount of discussion of what you've got wrong or right. In some ways, you can never please overly obsessive fans; it's just impossible. That doesn't mean to say they're not going to go to the movie and thoroughly enjoy it.

It's very rare, in a movie franchise, where you have the same creative team behind the camera and in front of the camera, pretty much, for the entire growth of the franchise.

When you watch movies in Britain, the reaction when people hate a movie is... they just politely get up and leave at the end. And when they love a movie... they just politely get up and leave at the end.

Apocalyptic movies tend to thrive when people are concerned about the state of the world.

I really believe that, as filmmakers, we have a duty, which is, if we're asking people to pay a premium price for a 3D ticket, we have a duty to deliver a premium product.

A pivotal moment for me as a filmmaker was when I saw 'Total Recall,' the Arnold Schwarzenegger version, which was the first movie I saw in America.

We are definitely modernizing 'The Three Musketeers' without compromising the fun of shooting a period piece. But in our film, corsets and feathered hats don't take center stage. Our version is rich in eye-popping action, romance, and adventure.

I saw 'Spacehunter 3-D.' It gave me a headache.

I grew up in England, and at the time, cinema was very heavy arthouse cinema, and there was no one making movies that were designed to be in multiplexes.

Tolkien was influenced by South Africa when he was writing 'Lord of the Rings.' It's really epic scenery.

If you're going to make a horror movie, it doesn't get any better than 'Alien,' and if you're going to make an action movie, it really doesn't get any better than 'Aliens.'

I've always felt that there's a lot of similarity between doing a comedy and doing a scary movie because jokes and scares are all about timing. If you give the punch line too early or too late, the joke falls flat. And it's the same with a scare.

I think 'Lost' didn't invent the flashback, obviously. It's been a cinematic tool. It's been around almost as long as cinema has.