A Quote by James Wan
I kind of joke that creating franchises is a lot like directing pilot episodes of TV series. You set a look and feel and kind of pass it on.
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I've always said that with a lot of the horror franchises that I've started, it's like directing a pilot. I come in, I direct the first movie and all these directors come in and direct all the sequels after me and hey have to kind of retain the look, the tone, and the characters.
The hardest thing about doing a series and having it stick is that you've never performed with each other, and the pilot is kind of a dress rehearsal, and you don't know the tone until two or three episodes in.
I've kind of gone from TV series to TV series or project to project, and I've wanted to get back in a rehearsal room. I feel like there's that exploration process, in a way, that you get in phases on jobs but I do wish I had that time [at school].
With 'Twilight,' you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With 'Penoza,' we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there's a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.
Every episode [in a TV series] is a challenge, and what's challenging in most episodes is the monster. You're always a heartbeat from the monster looking ridiculous. You really have to work so hard to make them not look like ridiculous when they turn up on the set.
I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.
People love that kind of beginning, middle, and end. They like that comfort of turning on the TV week-to-week and being entertained with a good story. There's nothing wrong with TV franchises because, first of all, they're successful. They just make people feel good and hopefully make people think about other people.
You kind of wake up in the morning, and you don't see anybody but these actors until you go home at night and pass out and do it again. So it's structured a lot like the process when you're making a film. You just kind of get in that tunnel vision. I like that. I like when the rest of the world kind of quiets.
I definitely think that a lot of these fighters should be taken care of long-term. But I feel like we're in that kind of situation where it's, like, the early NFL players. We're the ones that kind of set the standard, and then the next generation are probably going to get all the benefits from us growing the sport.
If you look at 'American Horror Story' or 'Crime Story,' these are visceral, action-packed, sometimes bloody episodes of television. They're not 'feminine.' They're not about sexy women sitting around looking beautiful, drinking lattes. These episodes are calling cards to show companies like Marvel, 'Look, women can do these kind of movies.'
TV series, there's a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they're on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows.
I wanted to move between film and theater - I never felt like I fit into TV. And I'm very anti-TV, like, 'I'm never going to do TV,' but also, TV didn't want me either, so it was kind of perfect. And then, of course, cable happened, and suddenly it was like, 'Oh, I could do that kind of stuff.'
As an actor and a writer, the anxiety about doing TV is that you start to feel like you get married to one tone or one kind of idea and you feel like you want to be able to express a lot of different things.
My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
Obviously Mad TV, SNL are one kind of show, whereas The State belongs to the kind of show that is entirely conceived written and performed by a set group that existed before the TV show.
Comedy scares me a lot. I feel like it's way harder than drama. I think my safety net is definitely drama, and I would love to kind of be able to be able to push into the comedy world and do something kind of like a Christopher Guest kind of style show. That, to me, is my kind of comedy. Like, Ricky Gervais comedy. That's my kind of thing.
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