The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

I actually like 'The Shining' more than I like Kubrick, I think. The tension he sustains through the whole film is so great.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

Witches were really scary to me as a kid.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in independent film. But obviously, yeah - all the comic-book-franchise stuff is deeply boring. But these comic-book characters are the pagan pantheon of gods in today's contemporary culture. It's so important to so many people.

I mean, obviously it's exciting for me to see what 'The Revenant' is doing in the box office. That's very exciting.

My office is just overflowing with books about witches and books about 17th-century animal husbandry and agricultural farm tools from the period.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

In a world where people believe in something, then it does exist.