Quotes from Scott Derrickson

I don't fear pain or failure anymore because I'm too grateful for the pains and failures of my past – they have made me who I am, and most of the good things in my life are a direct result of them in some way.

I can't help but view the world mystically. It's how I see it. I'm not a strict materialist. I think there's much more to the world than what we see with our five senses.

I have friends who are scientists, strict materialists, who don't think science and religion are compatible, but I just think most of us - unless you're a strict atheist materialist, which there aren't many of - most of us believe in something outside the material world. And if you do believe that, I don't know how you're not obsessed with it.

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.

I think the single most important, fascinating, and complex aspect of human nature is that we all know, deep down, that we are not what we ought to be - or as John Doe says in 'Seven,' 'We are not what was intended.'

There's a whole, that is a whole subgenre within martial arts cinema. The supernatural martial arts movie. Particularly within Asian cinema.

Martial arts is the kind of action that does tie in well to the supernatural.

I've never been a materialist; I've never been somebody who believes in only what we can see and measure. I continue to be a student of religious philosophy, and I continue to take those ideas very seriously.

I love the horror genre for how cinematic it is. I gravitated, I think, initially, toward the horror genre because, of all the genres, I think it is the genre that is most friendly to the subject matter of faith and belief in religion.

I spent a lot of my adult life overcoming fear. It was a subject I knew a lot about, and it's one of the most important and most powerful human emotions. Fear is one of the greatest driving forces in the world. So I thought I could go into the horror genre and do things differently and contribute a different point of view.

The evil within the fantasy genre tends to be threatening to the heroes within the story, but not to the reader - or not to the viewer, in the case of cinema - and that's why I think it's more palatable and something that is more easily embraced for a lot of people.

My faith sometimes burdens me with the responsibility to think very deeply and long and hard about the choices I make creatively. There are projects I turn down because the material is too much a violation of what I believe. But that's true of anybody.