I quit doing the movies because the wrestling was going so good and was so on fire during the '80s and '90s but I was getting all these movie scripts.

With the CGI suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days especially the ones that deal with fantasy is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

Usually when you see females in movies they feel like they have these metallic structures around them they are caged in by male energy.

Now there are so many movies so many festivals and so many awards going on each judged with each other like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.

You have to get the audience invested even if you're doing something that they think is dumb it's kind of what these movies are all about.

I mean movies in general tend to sort of portray time space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you and you're always you.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody along with Vincent Price who I celebrate and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

There are movies that require fantasy and slightly more fantastical acting. Lines that are good for certain movies in real life circumstances would be absolutely unbelievable things to really say and you would look at these people like they're freaks for conversing that way. But somehow for certain styles of movies it works and it seems fine.

I think these movies are as much for people of that time as for people who weren't born. For people who weren't born they see how leaders must act under a crisis situation not trying to be re-elected or not trying to check polls that they go from their gut check.

I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done people still recite lines to me even 20 years later.

I don't want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it's just too hard these days.

I love these movies where it's just about the film. You don't have my face on the poster. It's all about the movie. I like that.

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

I grew up watching all these crazy movies European movies and stuff and I guess that I always laughed at things that were a little more offbeat.

I still like the run and gun action movies and how truly dangerous it can be to make these films.

Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore.