The trappings of a religious cult tend to fall into candlelit ceremonies and robes and group chanting and singing and prayer.
— Sean Durkin
The most reckoning Sean Durkin quotes to get the best of your day
Filmmaking is a real craft.
A big fear of working with an actor that's never been a lead in a film before is that you're going to have to work really hard to pull a performance out of her.
You know, when you're isolated on set for like a month, people like to get rowdy.
When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.
I wasn't good enough to be a professional soccer player obviously but that was my first goal in life.
I remember being at school during morning meeting and looking around at everybody, 350 kids, saying a prayer. We're all very young and no one knows what it means, and I remember feeling strange that people were just repeating words that they didn't understand. I refused to participate. For some reason I always rejected it, but respectfully.
What I learned from directing, I learned from soccer, where it's like a coach-player relationship.
I love the first hour of a horror movie, the fear and anticipation.
Then, when it gets bloody, I lose interest.
Well, first of all, making films is a collaborative process.
You need people. You need people you trust and love and who are your friends. People you can work with.
I went to my first college to play soccer.
I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.
I always try to keep the confidence of the actors, and try my best to make them feel comfortable or confident.
Sports teams, people who follow sports teams, religion, churches, work - any company, I find that people just generally have a need to belong to something larger than themselves.
You can't write something to please someone.
I won't rewrite on set, but I'll just trim the fat.
When I hire actors I believe in their abilities.
When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.
The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.
When I was a kid, I was afraid of large group of conforming people.
I would like to do a sports movie.
I was really into writing short fiction and also photography when I was a kid.
In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points.
What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.
It's sort of one ongoing process where writing ends and directing starts.