Quotes from Sean Durkin

When someone stays with you and they're not your guest, even when they are your guest they get on your nerves. When people visit for long periods of time, that just happens.

I was really into writing short fiction and also photography when I was a kid.

You can't write something to please someone.

When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.

I'm a believer in film school.

Filmmaking is a real craft.

I wasn't good enough to be a professional soccer player obviously but that was my first goal in life.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

When I hire actors I believe in their abilities.

When I was a little kid, I loved horror films. I always liked being scared.

Well, first of all, making films is a collaborative process. You need people. You need people you trust and love and who are your friends. People you can work with.

Sports teams, people who follow sports teams, religion, churches, work - any company, I find that people just generally have a need to belong to something larger than themselves.

What I learned from directing, I learned from soccer, where it's like a coach-player relationship.

I would like to do a sports movie.

In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.

I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

I love the first hour of a horror movie, the fear and anticipation. Then, when it gets bloody, I lose interest.

I won't rewrite on set, but I'll just trim the fat.

What I learned from directing, I learned from soccer, where it's like a coach-player relationship.

I went to my first college to play soccer.

You know, when you're isolated on set for like a month, people like to get rowdy.

It's sort of one ongoing process where writing ends and directing starts.

I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully.