Quotes from Scott Derrickson

There are certainly better writers and directors than me, but I have worked very hard to earn credibility within the business as a quality writer and a good director.

Corporate America limits the world to consumerism. Science can limit it to the material world. Even religion limits it to a lot of theories that can explain everything. I think we need cinema to break that apart and remind us that we're not in control, and we don't understand as much as we think do.

My superpower would be telepathy. And I would by necessity need to use it with discretion, not all the time.

If you really look hard at the evidence, the most rational conclusion is to believe that the demonic is real.

I think that the secular work environment in general is a place that's challenging for Christians to thrive in without getting caught up in materialism or in competitiveness or in things that are really not important.

For me, there is a basic recognition of horror as the most open doorway where the intersection of philosophical and religious ideas can come tighter.

For something to be completely evil is to be nothing. Satan has good attributes - intelligence, for instance - but they are corrupted. I cannot reconcile myself emotionally to alternative understandings of evil.

Kurosawa is my hero, and I've taught courses on his films, and I love what he does, and 'Rashomon' is, I think, his second greatest film after 'Ikiru.'

I'm married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that - in screenplays or movies that I've worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won't know the difference.

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.

I think that Christians who have an interest in filmmaking need to deepen their love for cinema. To be honest, that's what I think has been missing historically from the Christians who want to succeed in the Hollywood industry.

If we had one person who could perfectly read minds we could solve a lot of problems in the world in a very short period of time.

I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school and went to a fundamentalist church, and they were the greatest people; there was an amazing sense of community. The problem is when the messiness of real life enters, and the inflexibility of a moral code cannot cope with the realities of moral relativism.

Fundamentalism is rooted in fear, and it's another reason I'm interested in the horror genre, because I know the fear that fundamentalism is built upon.

I'm not going to work outside of genre. It's going to be horror, action, or sci-fi. I don't ever really see myself being interested in movies outside of that.

There are some people who shouldn't watch horror films, and I'm all right with that.

In my horror movies, I was always trying to deal with real characters and real character drama played by good actors... Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Eric Bana, and Tom Wilkinson, people who don't do horror normally.

In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.

To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world and recognizing that there is evil within us and that we're not in control and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear.

Fundamentalism is such a pejorative word and immediately evokes images of angry extremism. In my experience, that's not usually what it looks like. I was a fundamentalist in high school.

If we're not compelled to gain a deeper understanding of good and evil, how can we make the world a better place? How can we find ourselves at the end of our lives and know that our lives were significant? Those things would be impossibilities.

Catholicism is so steeped in imagery. It's one of the many reasons Catholicism has given birth to so many great filmmakers compared to the Protestant tradition - even in America, where we're primarily Protestant.

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.

The marketing of my movies is something I have no control over! I usually am shown things to give input beforehand. Some directors get really involved with that, but it's not what I do. I don't know anything about marketing; it's not my skill set!