Paul W. S. Anderson Quotes

I'm a very collaborative person, so that's not the way I work any way. Once VW got over the idea that I was going to blow their cars up, then we shot the thing really fast and it came out really good. Like I said, it won a bunch of awards and that really was the start of working in commercials.

I started doing commercials in 2008 right after we released Death Race, and the reason was that I spent two years prepping Death Race and building all these custom rigs to shoot cars in the most dynamic and exciting way.

The other video game adaptation I did was Mortal Kombat, and I did that because I loved playing the games in the arcade. I play all of the Resident Evil games because I'm very much immersed in that world.

These commercials, I directed them all from inside the tracking vehicle, so I was traveling about 85mph most of the time, so there wasn't really anyone sitting beside me other than the driver. But, you know, yeah the agency is there and VW is there, which is- they're paying for it all and also because the agency created the boards, they want to make sure that you're not going off the rails in executing it. And also they can help, because they- it's a very different thing to cinema.

What happened with Final Destination was that the movie was in post-production for a long time and I think they changed a lot of the deaths, so a lot of those things were last-minute additions. Everything we shot is in the movie and it's all been designed. We didn't change anything. It's been a year of making those things happen, exactly as we had pictured them.

Oh, yeah. A big part of my job is drinking martinis when I work in advertising.

When that technology becomes widespread and it's on every car on the freeways, it's going to save so many lives. Especially in America, so many people get killed in these multi-car pileups on the freeways.

There's something very terrifying about that and very primal about it. It's my belief that what horror does for people is that it provides that primal fear that, when we were wild hunter-gatherers, we had as part of our natural lives because maybe something was trying to hunt and gather you as well. We don't have that anymore in life and that's one of the things that horror films and action films provide for us.

Death Race was a very modern action movie and it used all of those modern action techniques with lots of hand-held camera, lots of punchy zooms, and lots of quick movements and quick cuts. In 3D, I didn't want to do that anymore.

I never really thought I went away because I've written all of the movies and I'm produced them all and certainly provided services about and beyond the average producer on two and three. I was on set most of the films and called action and cut a lot of times and did all that good stuff.

I had the opportunity to work with Aliens and Predators when Resident Evil 2 was being made and it was for two different studios. It was for Fox and Sony. They don't care about one another. They just want their movies. So it was very difficult to delay one and ... So I had to make a very painful decision to kind of step away from directing the second movie and with the third movie it was the same.

I was excited about the fourth movie I guess conceptually because, what I felt we should do it, we should try to make it a conceptual jump like Terminator did to T2. It was still the Terminator franchise, but it was something kind of bigger and grander.

You really feel like you're on the cutting edge and you know you are because all the camera equipment you take for granted doesn't exist for 3-D. So all the cranes with all the stabilized heads, they don't work on 3-D because they're all built for lightweight camera packages. As soon as you kind of put two cameras together and all the other crap that they need and the cabling to go back to the computers, we've literally, the cranes on these movies, they break after a couple of days.

I'm very impressed and the next movie I do I'm definitely going to use a lot of drones in it, because they're very light and flexible and fast, and there are things that you can do with them that you can't possibly do with a helicopter for safety reasons.

I really believe in 3-D. I really think it is the wave of the future for cinema.

3D really altered the way I shot the movie completely, and it was exciting because, after 20 years of filmmaking, I felt like I was making my first movie, all over again.

For me, it's a multitude of things. In the modern world, there's a real genuine fear of loss of individuality and I think the undead speak to that. I also think the idea of the dead coming back to life, and this unstoppable foe that just keeps coming and coming, but rather slowly just chases you, is a real primal fear. It's like a fear of claustrophobia, heights or water.

I went for a more classical approach to filmmaking with lots of dolly, track and cranes, and slightly slower, more choreographed fight moves, so you get more fight moves in one take.

Commercials are also any opportunity to meet new crew and work with new kind of rigs. You can explore working with different people without having to make the full commitment of having to do an entire feature film with them and see whether you like them. Also it's great for testing out new equipment, like on the last spot we just did, I used a lot of drone technology, really cutting edge drone stuff, more than I've ever done before, and it worked out really really well.

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same.

Every movie is a commitment of a year or a year and a half. Commercials are much faster than that because they're much more contained. You can get in and out really fast, and you do a piece of work the you see the end result very quickly.

When you're writing it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea. It's nice- that again, is another nice thing about being able to do commercials is, you can get out of the house and chase high speed cars around for a few days and then by the time you go back, you're kind of re-infused to write.

I think, as a filmmaker, my style of filmmaking is very well-suited to 3-D anyway, so it's not like I'm having to change a huge amount of the way I shoot to work in 3-D. I think you could probably dimensionalize some of my movies and they would make very good 3-D films.

It's all based around the idea that basically VW cars are space age. They're the worst cars to use in action movie, because all the things you want to traditionally do in an action movie they won't allow you to do, because they make you drive safely if you want to or not.

I think people were a little nervous to work with me to start with, because the movies I've done they thought that I wouldn't be able to control myself at all. I'd have to blow up the cars or something like that, and I think also people are scared of working sometimes with feature directors, because they feel like you're not going to listen to their opinions.

I always run the stories by Capcom. They read the scripts and give their comments. I would never want to kill a character that they really want to use in the next game.

I've so got my plate full with Resident Evil and then The Three Musketeers, I'm just not involved with Castlevania. I'm not personally involved with the movie at all. I'm not producing that. After these two films, then I'm having a holiday.

The first job I did was Volkswagen, we shot it in Long Beach, and it was like they won multiple awards with it and they were super excited about it and that kind of launched me into the world of commercials. Still most of what I do is car-related stuff.