Top 53 Quotes & Sayings by David Slade

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want.

When I was doing music videos, everybody was very snobbish about music video directors doing commercials. It was all guys from ad agencies.

I think, as a filmmaker, you're always responsible for your film.

I really appreciate gory movies.

Francis Lawrence is an astonishing filmmaker, an incredibly gifted visual filmmaker. I have great respect for his work.

I'm a big fan of horror movies. But I prefer visceral to viscous, let's just say that.

I believe the most interesting thing to look at in the world is the human face, so that is why I tend to be a little closer to human faces than maybe other directors will be.

I believe that filmmaking is a brilliant thing to do - be doing - for a living.

I think it's really difficult to justify converting a film that wasn't shot in 3-D into 3-D. I really do believe, as does James Cameron and all the people who are actually pro-3-D, that you have to go out and shoot it that way. You have nothing but compromise if you don't.

Film becomes a living organism. After awhile, it begins to tell you what it needs, and you're usually best listening.

I thought, 'Who is the first vampire ever? It's Peter Murphy!'

I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.

My agent and manager would sternly tell me exactly the number of projects that we've turned down at this point. But, I think it's really important to do the right thing next.

Make the film that you love. When you find a film that you love, every molecule of your being will be moving in the direction of making the best film you can possibly make. This should be your default mode of operation.

Computer-generated monsters - people shoot them all day with videogames, you know, so kids aren't going to be afraid of that. People are getting immune to scares.

When I got the script for 'Eclipse,' I thought it was a damn good story.

The vampires of '30 Days of Night' never really came into discussions early on. They did later when we were trying to figure out the pathology of the 'Twilight' vampires. '30 Days' is a completely different film. If you are a kid, please ask mum and dad before you watch that one!

I think it's a mistake to try and overthink how you are going to be received, because that assumes that you are going to be received in the first place.

I look for challenges. I really do.

I don't see myself as particularly highbrow. I am much more populist.

As a director, it just makes my life fantastic to work with people like Elizabeth Hawthorne.

I'd love to make films in England, and I tried to. I think there's a wealth of amazing talent and astonishing writing over here; there just seems to be more of a culture of developing films than actually making them.

Film will always be my main focus, but designing and publishing my own work is something I will also always do.

I don't do commentaries; I can't listen to them, either.

Here I was, having done a thriller and a horror movie - why did I have the audacity to make a romantic fantasy? How can I continue to make genre films? Well, maybe I don't want to continue to make genre films.

What attracted me to 'Eclipse' was that it is a great story and a tremendous challenge for me as a filmmaker.

To get the film in your head on the screen, first you have to take it out of your head and explain it to everyone who is working with you. This will take work and planning.

'Twilight' was a cult film, and the books were huge, but after 'New Moon,' it really blew up.

When you are doing music videos through the '90s, which I did, and the 2000s, you were put in the position, really, as an independent filmmaker. You were being financed by a major record company or a minor record company or whatever.

Certainly there is a lot of collaboration, but there is also a lot of clarity that has to be had in the vision that you have for the film when you come in as the director. Without that, there's no bullseye to be aiming for.

Being able to communicate what your vision is clearly and with specificity is the most important thing a director can do.

On one level, this was the biggest challenge out there - to make a film of this scope, in this amount of time, and to go into a different genre, essentially. Yes, I've done a vampire film, but 'Eclipse' is a very different kind of thing. This is a romantic story, which swings from a darker, more abject feeling to very pure romantic scenes.

I think if you have too much fear, you're never going to break ground or develop.

There's so much burying of heads in sand going on in the U.S., people are finally beginning to recognize that the environment is dying, but it's far too late, and I am conflicted.

I think filmmaking is largely about preparation and taste and luck. If you have all of those three things, I think you will find you can work somehow.

I think that the most important thing we have is our ability communicate and love other humans.

With 'Cold Skin,' I believe we can create a lasting psycho-physiological horror film. It is one of the most atmospheric, terrifying, cinematic, and original stories of the human spirit.

Films are pushing envelopes in terms of what is horrific, but also on other areas: in video games, in comic books and outside life.

It's good to know where you've come from.

Personally, I have nightmares about the unstoppable monster.

Appreciate good coffee when it's available, but drink whatever they have on set and always say thank you for it.

Suspense is a real tough beast in terms of the filmmaking.

Film is always a fight because you're the person, as the director, with a clear picture in your head of what you think is really exciting, and you're just trying to convince a bunch of other people to buy into that.

I don't like doing the same thing over and over again, because I learn from being challenged.

It's funny: I rarely reference anything, and I'm one of those people that doesn't really spend much time in other people's worlds. I just try and create my own and make it as distinctive as I can.

As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic.

I don't do commentaries on films because A) I'm not very good at it and B) it's an odd thing that I discovered, on my first film, that you go through this really intense experience of making a film and then you sit in a little room with a monitor and you reduce the thing to a bunch of silly anecdotes. It's really unfulfilling and I've never really enjoyed listening to them anyway, so I just don't do them.

As the director, you're meant to be critical and you are, so there are loads of things. But the thing is, the way I look at it is, to try to get some measure of success, it's dangerous to look at financial or critical success, or positive response as a measure.

Mads has a terrifying subtlety and as the episodes go on, you start seeing the way a person can command other people by doing practically nothing and terrifying the sh*t out of you. He is the most astonishingly subtle performer with the most incredibly keen sense of what his face can do and how his words can form. He has a mission. Nothing is by chance. I truly believe as long as we have success in seasons that Mads will become the defining face of Hannibal Lecter.

There's this point between conscious and subconscious when you realize you were asleep and resting, and you were having all kinds of anxiety dreams about the film and all the things that can go wrong. You get in this hypnagogic state, where you're waking up and realizing, "Oh, it was just a dream."

Film becomes a living organism. After awhile, it begins to tell you what it needs and you're usually best listening.

With a DVD, you want something you can own, you can watch, you can come to grips with and you can explore. It's something larger than the film, when it's going out to a fan base.

I've always been very, very supportive of fan cultures. I'm a fan of all kinds of things.