"Psycho is a wonderful, elevated horror film, and it doesn’t necessarily have monsters or ghosts,” Simmons says. “You ever see Psycho? I’m embarrassed to say that there are people out there who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. Shame on them. It’s interesting to note Psycho had murders and all this kind of wacky stuff but you never saw a knife go into a body. You never saw a body actually bleed. I think that made it even more horrific. Sometimes the scariest things are what human beings are capable of.”

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"One of my favorite films of recent years is A History of Violence, but I don’t share the notion that we are implicated in its violence. Where is the conflict in seeing psycho killers rubbed out? In Leonard Kastle’s sole film, however, we are painfully implicated. The victims, all defenseless women and a child, are brutally murdered in a context so unreasonably entertaining that we hate ourselves for not turning away. The setup for the most grueling of these murders appears to be an homage to the Turkish-bath scene in Children of Paradise."