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Frank: (on Quentin Tarantino) I find Quentin's work very interesting, because he does dabble so well in the nihilistic world, but yet, there's a real streak of humanity in his work. It's not about the nihilism, it's about people in a sense operating as honorably as they can in a nihilistic world.
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Frank: (on Stephen King) We have a joke now - because the first two films I directed were period prison movies - that my directing career will stall unless he writes another period prison story.
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Frank: (on the ending of the 2007 film The Mist) That's one of the reasons we shot it so quickly and cheaply, because of that ending. I wound up making it for about half the budget that I had been offered which came with the caveat that I changed the ending, and I didn't know what another ending would have been, frankly. And I think trying to adjust it would have felt like a total sell-out to me. Honestly, its the ending I had in mind, and whether you love the ending or hate the ending, I stand by it. I think cinema is an art form, it's all expression. I thought "Okay, lets make it for half that budget and keep that ending, so I can make the movie I set out to make". Otherwise I'm just a hired monkey.
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Frank: Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities. Sometimes an artist rises above his source material. I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.
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Frank: (on his rejected script for Indiana Jones 4) Steven was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you're working on as much as I love the Indiana Jones films. And then you have George Lucas read it and say, 'Yeah, I don't think so, I don't like it.' And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts. You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say enough of that.
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Frank: If you look at a classic horror movie like The Exorcist, part of what makes it so scary is that it feels so damn real. If you add a layer of too much hysterical, theatrical reality, then audiences take it less seriously. But if you play it for absolute reality, then the dread and the horror - which is why we go to horror movies in the first place - is reinforced.
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Frank: The Majestic is a movie I'm very proud of and I really love. It achieved exactly what I set out to make. And I find it very moving. It's a very sweet and quaint movie. That's always a tough sell.
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Frank: The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we're soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.
