I think the thing I took most from game playing was just getting in the characters head. I took it really seriously. There’s something about creating your character. – Drew Goddard
I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don’t know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that’s still happening there. – Drew Goddard
I think that there’s good movies and there’s bad movies, and sometimes the bad movies spoil it for the rest of us, and we focus on them, but in the long run, all that matters are the good movies. Those are the ones that we will remember. – Drew Goddard
I think ‘The Thing’ is so good because it’s not just a scary movie. It’s also social commentary, which works on multiple levels, which is something I really respond to. – Drew Goddard
I’ve found that if you just try to make the film you want, you’ll find the right audience. If you try to please everyone, you’re going to make really boring films. – Drew Goddard
I guess I’m just the kind of person who likes to do it all. It’s fun to put on the writer’s hat and go hide by myself with my computer for six months. Then it’s fun to come out and put the director hat on and deal with all the things that a director deals with. Then it’s fun to just be the producer and, um, not do anything. – Drew Goddard
There’s just something wonderful about getting a small group of people together in an isolated location, and there’s something about cabins themselves that imply both horror and fun. When you go to a cabin, you’re usually going to have a good time. – Drew Goddard
With horror movies, a bigger budget is actually your enemy. You want to feel the rough edges, the handmade quality to good horror films. It’s a genre that benefits from not having everything at your disposal. – Drew Goddard
When you’re talking about who is doing the most exciting and interesting horror films of the last 20 years, it’s Japan. I mean, they are making amazing films. – Drew Goddard
One of the things that’s been nice about my career is that I’ve been able to do so many different things, and variety keeps your creative soul fulfilled. I’m constantly looking to find new things to do. It’s just project to project for me. You never know where the next thing’s going to come from. – Drew Goddard
In the ‘Buffy’ room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, ‘Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,’ but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson. – Drew Goddard
Here’s the thing about ‘Cabin in the Woods.’ I did virtually no research on this movie. – Drew Goddard
That’s the thing about Lionsgate. They are fearless. No other studio would have made ‘Hunger Games’ the way they did. They’re being fearless in the way they make decisions, and it’s paying off for them. – Drew Goddard
Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It’s always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That’s true for all movies. – Drew Goddard
The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later. – Drew Goddard
The logistics of blood is something that I didn’t even understood as a first-time director. Not just actors and make-up, but once a set gets bloody, you don’t un-blood it. Once something gets bloody, you either rebuild the set, or you just don’t get the shot. – Drew Goddard
I think audiences crave something new. I don’t think audiences want the same old thing, no matter how much conventional Hollywood tells you that. – Drew Goddard
The horror genre gets you in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives you this chance to sort of reflect on who we are and look at the sort of uglier side that we don’t always look at, and have fun with that very thing. – Drew Goddard
I’ve been lucky between ‘Buffy,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Alias,’ and then ‘Lost.’ The thing they all have in common is that they were all fearless. They were not afraid to be different and try something different. Even if you didn’t know that it was going to work, just try to do something new and fresh. – Drew Goddard
Clearly, the works of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi are front and center here. Argento is definitely there. But even stuff like the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies had quite an influence on me growing up. – Drew Goddard
We’ve always idealized youth and then destroyed youth. That has happened since the beginning of time, and I’m fascinated by why we do that. – Drew Goddard
I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn’t care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off. – Drew Goddard
That’s the fun part about being a director. You get to say, ‘Oh, now that I’m in charge, I can try and cast whoever I want.’ They can always say no, but that’s okay. – Drew Goddard
