Go Into The Story Interview: Scott Derrickson

My in-depth 2018 conversation with co-writer and director of the Marvel movie Doctor Strange as well as horror movies The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and The Black Phone.

I crossed paths with Scott Derrickson via Twitter several years ago. We discovered a shared passion for Bob Dylan and Flannery O’Connor. Also, both of us came from conservative religious upbringings. Here is the entirety of our wide-ranging 2018 interview.

Scott Myers: You grew up in Colorado. How would you describe your family life as a youth?

Scott Derrickson: Through elementary and middle school I lived in a working class, blue‑collar neighborhood. An even mixture of Mexicans and whites — but I don’t recall much racial tension.

There were a lot of kids. Mostly boys. I was the youngest. I counted once — 18 boys on the same city block where I lived, and I was the youngest. So I grew up with a lot of bullying, and a lot of fear. [laughs] I was a weird little kid in an environment that was pretty hostile.

That was back in the days when everybody was physically violent — there were fights all the time. Every day it seemed. But it wasn’t like it is now — there weren’t weapons or gangs or anything like that.

Scott Myers: When you say fear, I remember reading something where you said that you thought that’s one of the strengths of horror movies, facing fear and then growing from that.

Scott Derrickson: Yeah, I’ve said a lot of about that. For sure, the predominant emotion of my childhood was fear. When that’s the case, you spend your adulthood reckoning with it.

The fear was the result of my neighborhood, my family life, certain traumatic events, and my own emotional makeup. And I think that I initially was drawn into religion in high school — specifically fundamentalist Christianity — as a way of coping with all the fear I felt.

Subsequently, fear became the hurdle I would spend most of my adult life trying to clear. A lot of my work demonstrates that plainly. It’s certainly why I ended up working in the horror genre.

Fear and the confrontation of fear has been the central occupation of my life.

Scott Myers: Did you grow up in a religious family, or was that something that you came to on your own?

Scott Derrickson: In those early years, there was no religious presence in our home. My later connection to religion came through my own discovery and choice. My parents also ended up becoming church‑going people around the same time, but their experience and mine were completely unrelated. We were all on very different paths, really.

I had a very powerful conversion at a fundamentalist Bible camp in middle school. It was a profound experience. And to this today, I still can’t un‑ring that bell. I can’t deny the power or the veracity of that experience. It had nothing to do with the charisma of the people that were there. I wasn’t caught in some emotional frenzy. It was an ineffable experience that was purely my own. It was as though I found some language to describe what I had always known to be true.

Before that, from my earliest memories, I always saw life in a weirdly spiritual way. It’s I just how I felt about the world — I had an innate instinct and belief that the immaterial world was as real or even more real than the material world. I’ve believed in God and the metaphysical for as long as I can remember. It’s just my nature. I couldn’t change it if I tried.

Because that way of experiencing the world is so innate, I have also come to understand why some people are not religious and don’t respect the nature of spirituality. If someone doesn’t instinctively see and feel that the world as something spiritually immeasurable, it’s doubtful they will ever be argued into believing otherwise. I can’t expect them to feel life as I do, anymore than I can feel life as they do.

But I should qualify these comments with the fact that I’m also a doubter and a skeptic about my specific beliefs. I question them all the time, and have definitely gotten to places in my life — in college especially — where I intellectually lost my faith. But still, I couldn’t get rid of the fact that the world felt magical and designed to me. I couldn’t deny the power and meaning of my spiritual experience.

I still struggle with doubts and strive to be a critical thinker, but I don’t think I’ve ever come close to being an atheist. It’s just too contradictory to how I experience life.

Scott Myers: I read a quote from you in an interview where you said, “The truth is that we live in a world where what we don’t know greatly outweighs what we do know. If you understand that and accept it, the world becomes a magical place.” Could you comment on that?

Scott Derrickson: That’s a solid quote. I must have put that on Twitter — it sounds so well‑forged. I think that’s my continuing rebellion against fundamentalism speaking. While I’m grateful to organized religion for setting me on a path of discovery, I’ve had to discard many if not most of my beliefs as I’ve grown intellectually. Christianity — fundamentalism and evangelicalism especially — offer too many answers and not enough mystery to the nature of life. And without that mystery, life would be stale. It make the world feel small, and I’ve never felt the world to be small.

I’m equally critical of both science and religion when it comes to this. I believe very strongly in science and the veracity of science. I believe very strongly in the legitimacy of good theology. Both cosmology and theology matter to me. But I think that anybody who is honest with themselves has to reckon with the fact that we really don’t know very much.

What we experience in our few years of life is so often formed by a kind of institutional broadcast from religion, science, and politics — science broadcasts the notion that we’re simply organisms in an environment, religion says we’re creatures under a God who demands obedience, politics tell us that we’re social beings defined by our communal stance. And of course, the Consumerism aggressively and literally broadcasts that we are here to buy things. We’re here to be occupied with Apple products and clothing lines. All of these ideas have an effect of reducing life to something that’s not mysterious and not magical.

I was fortunate be born with a natural resistance to all of that. I don’t think I’m smarter than everybody else because see thing this way. It’s just my basic nature. It’s in my basic outlook. As I have gotten older, I feel the pressure of all those major institutional broadcasts even more. Whether it be religion, science, politics, or consumerism — all things in which I’m a participant.

I just feel they’re always trying to reduce the world to be so much less than it is. And I don’t want it to be reduced. I want to walk through a world of magic. I want that, because I believe it’s true. And to be clear, to me, what is magical isn’t always enchanting. For me, more often than not, it’s frightening.

Scott Myers: I’m wondering if your interest in movies arose from that sensibility, because cinema has those unique magical ways to transport us into story. Do you think there’s any connection there?

Scott Derrickson: There’s absolutely a connection there. For me it’s been so reciprocal — the magic of movies and the magic of life. And that magic for me is usually daunting and scary. Movies — darker movies especially — were always a kind of dream‑like fiction that so often felt more like the world to me than what people were telling me [laughs] about the world.

As early four or five years old, I’d be taken into a theater by my parents or stumble upon some old black and white film on TV, and have these amazing experiences of other people and their points of view through movies. The best thing about my childhood was that my parents were avid movie goers.

It became a place where my feeling about the world was validated over and over again. At the same time, it also formed the way that I felt about the world. Whether it was an old horror film on TV or when I was eleven and “Star Wars” came out — movies reinforced and redefined how I felt about the world.

I was like every other kid when Star Wars came out. It spoke to us like the fairy tale of the generation that George Lucas intended it to be. We all connected to it, because it captured the magic of the world. This is what the world actually feels like. Isn’t that amazing?

Movies like Star Wars give us these mythologies and characters that we can connect to it and be attached to and dress up like on Halloween. The relationship of believing in the magical, mysterious nature of the world and cinema are so intertwined.

It’s also, I think, why I’m so drawn to certain eras of music — like the mid‑’60s to mid‑’70s — whether it’s the Beatles or Bob Dylan or psychedelic rock in general, it’s the same thing. It’s all about connecting to an expansive view of things that is fresh and not boring, filled with endless possibilities.

Scott Myers: Would it be fair to say that your interest in being a filmmaker was an extension of your passion for movies that you not only wanted to watch them and absorb them but create them and give people that wondrous magical, even mystical power that movies have on our audience?

Scott Derrickson: That’s exactly what happened. I can tell you the three films that were most instrumental in that happening. It’s significant. One of them is a TV movie, one a big Hollywood hit, and one a European art film.

The first time that I ever began to think about being a director and about the fact that people get to make movies was shortly after my dad brought home our first video recorder. It was a beta machine. He chose the superior format of beta over VHS to his own financial detriment, since beta faded out so quickly.

I remember taping Michael Mann’s very first movie which was a TV movie called The Jericho Mile, starring Peter Strauss. I think it won some Emmys that year. This would have been in the late ’70s, maybe early ‘80s.

I loved it so much. It was the first time I could watch a movie more than once. I started to watch it every day. I started to watch it over and over and over again. Dozens of times. I became addicted to this experience of repeatedly viewing this same movie.

The film is very Michael Mann. When I met him, I told him the story of how obsessed I became with it. He told me he shot it in 16 days inside a real prison, using real prisoners for a lot of speaking parts. It’s about a guy who’s an Olympic‑level runner, but he’s serving a life sentence. Mann used the Stones Sympathy for the Devil under these beautiful slow motion montages. It’s pure cinema.

I remember watching that it was like a sudden epiphany — I started thinking, “Somebody did that. Somebody got this piece of music and put it with these images. That’s why this is so awesome. Somebody actually did that. Hey, wouldn’t it be awesome to be that guy?”

[laughter]

Just to do that — it would be so amazing. Absolutely amazing.

And then years later in high school, Top Gun came out. I went and saw it with a friend at the best theater in Denver — the Century 21 on Colorado Boulevard.

I remember experiencing the THX sound as the jets were flying past me — from the back of the theater to the front. From one side of the theater and out past the Exit sign. I remember thinking again during that movie about how somebody pieced this all together. Somebody constructed this incredible, visceral experience that I was having. It was so powerful and overwhelming. Especially for the time, it was an exquisite piece of filmmaking. Nobody had made anything like it.

Afterward, I remember walking with my friend through the parking lot of the theater. He said, “So what’d you think?” I answered him,”I think I know what I want to do for a living.” [laughs]

Years later, when I got to work with Jerry Bruckheimer, I told him this story about seeing it and how it impacted me, which he clearly appreciated.

The third film that locked it all in for me was my Freshman year in college. A lit professor had us watch a VHS copy of Fellini’s 8½. It was so dense and surreal and tapped into my deepest sense of dark mystery. I actually had a panic attack toward the end and had to run out of the room. But when I calmed down and watched it again, I realized that movies were more than I imagined. Movies could do anything.

I think that one sealed the deal.

Scott Myers: You pursued that. You went to Biola University, and focused on literature, philosophy, film, and theological studies, and then got an MA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Now, at that point, you are on target.

Scott Derrickson: Yeah. And I never really let go of that basic trajectory. I just got more focused as the years went by. I was 17 when I packed up my car in Denver and drove to California, and didn’t know anyone here. I had very little money. I just decided I’m going to go out to Hollywood and try to find my way into making movies. And that’s what ended up happening.

Scott Myers: As your career has evolved, you’ve been involved in a number of movie projects in the horror space. I’d like to unpack that a bit before we talk about the three of your movies.

First of all, I saw a tweet of yours recently, which you noted how much you enjoyed A Quiet Place. I think you said you thought it was more of a science fiction thriller rather than a horror movie. My question to you, what do you think discounts it from being a horror movie?

Scott Derrickson: I recant that statement. [laughs] I did on Twitter as well, by the way. But it was an important question for me. Since college, I’ve been keeping a list of every movie that I consider to be an excellent, four-star film. A list of all the best films I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing throughout my career how often I refer to that list, but it’s broken up specifically by genres.

I put the films in order by genre of the best, being the first one. I rank them all. With foreign films, I rank them in order by country. When it came to adding A Quiet Place, I found myself thinking, “Is this really a horror film or is more of a sci‑fi thriller? For example, I put Alien in my science fiction category — when of course, it’s a horror film as well. It’s a science fiction horror film, but I’d call it a science fiction film before I would call it a horror film.

So I just found myself musing about that, and at first put in my sci-fi category. There was lots of debate about it online, and I ultimately ended up moving it to the horror category when my friend, Steven D. Greydanus — a great NY film critic — argued that the perpetual tone of existential dread makes it horror film. And of course the Lovecraftian creatures themselves, which are gruesome and graphic, also help qualify it as a horror film.

It’s the predominance of unspoken or unspeakable fear that is the signature quality of any horror film. It’s much more about that than it is about body counts or how bloody it is or anything like that. In the end, what constitutes a horror film has a lot more to do with tone than anything else.

Scott Myers: I interviewed Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who wrote the original spec script for A Quiet Place. They had this idea back at the University of Iowa: “Make a sound, you die.”

Scott Derrickson: My God, that’s a perfect simple horror film concept.

Scott Myers: It really is. It’s interesting to me, of all the movie genres, I don’t think there’s probably any more loyal fans than horror movie fans. Why do you think that is?

Scott Derrickson: It’s an extreme genre. It’s the most extreme genre. It’s therefore going to attract the most extreme kinds of people and the most extreme fans.

Here’s the funny thing about that, though. In my experience there is no predicting who is going to be a horror film fan. I’ve met a lot of NYC cops, and one of the toughest, boldest, bravest cops in all of the New York City’s emergency services — a guy who dragged people out of the towers on 9/11 and barely got out alive — a guy who has seen so much shit, and he’s just terrified of horror films. Terrified. When I met him, he didn’t know that I made Sinister, and he actually brought it up.

I asked him what, if anything, he is afraid of. He said, “Supernatural shit. Especially in movies. Like that movie Sinister — did you see that fuckin’ movie? Oh my God,” It was one of my great moments in my life. I was like, “If I could scare this guy.”

But then I’ll meet some 80-year-old grandmother in a flower shop who’s seen every Hellraiser movie. [laughs] There’s just no specific type of person who really connects with horror cinema. You either love the visceral and vicarious experience of fear in a safe environment, because it’s cathartic and thrilling, or you don’t because for you, it’s just upsetting and painful.

This is why I never try to convince anyone to become a horror film fan if they don’t already like horror films. You can’t convince somebody to like roller coasters. If you don’t like them, you don’t like them. Nothing’s going to change that. If you love them, you probably love them crazy.

Scott Myers: There’s a quote of yours that’s related to this in another interview: “For anyone who takes cinema seriously, it’s important not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. You’ve got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places and figure out a way to make full use of it.”

And I think you were talking about being a horror director when you said, “It’s not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil. We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it.”

It sounds like you think there’s almost a pedagogical value in some respects for viewers watching horror movies. That they’re compelled to reckon with evil.

Scott Derrickson: Yeah, I think that’s the fundamental moral value of the genre. It’s the role that horror and gothic art has played through most of human history, especially throughout the religious world — these horrifying depictions of how evil corrupts and visceral demonstrations of the consequences of evil.

I remember once walking through the Prado Museum in Madrid thinking, “God, this is just floor after floor of devastating suffering, torture and death.” It’s because so much of that artwork is from a Catholic culture going back many centuries.

And it’s reductive to look at that magnificent art and say it was all simply intended to scare people into joining the church or to scare people to believing God to avoid going to hell. That’s in there, sure, but so much of it is just honest reckoning with the evil in the world. That classic Catholic artwork does that so effectively.

In light of that, it’s significant that cinema came into existence during the most secular century in history, when the power of religion was on the wane, and the power of statism rose.

It was suddenly no longer all about the power of the papacy or other theocracies, but the murderous state ideologies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. And in the midst of these global mass-murdering dictatorships, horror cinema didn’t always know exactly where its place was as source of moral commentary.

A lot of things were scary just to be scary. There was certainly, in the old classic horror films, the duality of man Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Wolf Man. And of course horror in the 50s took on the red scare with films like The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And I think that the Slasher movies in the exploitation horror era that I grew up with were always portraying arch moral connotations about sexuality, but rarely in powerful or artful ways.

And so now, in this era, I think what’s so exciting about the genre is how so many people are going so much deeper with ideologies and psychology and philosophy within horror. Just look at the treatment of adolescent sexuality in the Friday the 13th series vs It Follows.

Horror can carry so much meaning, reckoning with evil in the world, within nature, and most of all within our own human condition. It can connect to our unspoken and unspeakable fears in ways that I don’t think even horror literature can reach — at least, not in my experience.

Essentially, I feel very strongly that horror cinema serves a necessary good in the world. My boys are 12 and 14, and I’m watching them get drawn deeper and deeper into horror as I did at their age. It makes so much sense to me, that with all the tempestuous feelings they have, all the fears and anxieties that they now wrestle with as their understanding and experience of the world expands, the outlet of reckoning with that through horror cinema is a truly beautiful thing.

Whenever we finish watching horror movies together, they are always so happy. [laughs] It’s as though something has been dealt with. Something has been released. And it’s as though they’ve been given a bit more strength to go out and face whatever dark and oppressive things they are facing in their lives.

That’s certainly what the genre did for me and continues to do for me. It started in my teens and continues to this day. It’s what the genre has always been for me — a way of reckoning with fear.

Scott Myers: That circles right back to Joseph Campbell in “The Hero’s Journey.” The stories often arose as initiation rituals to prepare young people for becoming adults. They would hear stories about things that would scare them to prepare them for that entry into adult life.

Scott Derrickson: Yes. And the fact that horror feels transgressive is part of the dangerous appeal to young people. Of course, I do think it’s important for parents to monitor the effect of horror films on their individual children. I’m still very conscientious about what horror movies I will and won’t let my kids see. But it has definitely been an absolute good in my life, and I think it’s an absolute good in theirs too.

I don’t know what would’ve happened to me, or what person I would have become, had I not gone so deep into horror cinema as a viewer.

Also, during these very significant phases of my life when I was writing and directing each of my own horror films, I was intentionally reckoning with things that I was actually scared of, and each time I came through the filmmaking experience feeling stronger and less afraid for having done it.

Scott Myers: I’d like to explore that connection between horror and religion. One of the theories as to why religions arose is to explain the presence of evil. For example, why do bad things happen to good people? That led me to another one of your quotes where you said, “For me, horror is a uniquely suitable genre for the intersection of the philosophical and the religious. It’s a natural place for those separate arena’s of thought to come together. Many of the best films in the genre have strong philosophical or religious ideas at their core.”

Maybe just to be specific about it, are there a couple of movies that come to mind that really illustrate the point?

Scott Derrickson: Of course, the granddaddy of them all is The Exorcist. It’s almost not like a movie that we’ve seen — it’s more like something that we’ve all been through. You don’t watch The Exorcist, you survive it. It’s just so visceral and so powerful and so terrifying.

But what The Exorcist is actually about — what I think is at the core of that film — is rarely talked about, even though it’s always experienced by the viewer. Friedkin himself said it plainly, “The Exorcist is about the mystery of faith.” The mystery of faith, not the power of faith. It’s not merely about good triumphing over evil. It’s about a character reckoning with his own faith, his own profound struggle with doubt, and the mystery of the core of that struggle.

And talk about a movie that fills you with a sense of a magical world — that movie does it, even if you’re a complete materialist and don’t believe in the metaphysical or think the idea of possession is complete bullshit. That’s fine. The movie is still going to fill you with an awesome sense of mystery and wonder.

It’s going to tap into… At the very least, what it makes you feel is a strong identification with that priest’s journey, his struggle, and the mystery of his own faith and belief that takes him all the way to a place of making the sacrifice that he does at the end of the film.

In response to your question, that’s the first movie that comes to mind. Whenever I see the list of the best horror films ever made, I always think, “I wonder what number two will be.” [laughs]

What else? I just showed my kids The Shining. The tone of that movie is not like any other horror film I’ve seen. I think the core of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic genius is how he managed to nail very unique human experiential tones with each film. In The Shining, it is not simply fear. It’s the horror of madness and emotional estrangement.

He talked very articulately about it, about how the tone and the feeling of a movie is primary. That’s the center of the target that a good director tries to hit, because what a movie makes you feel or how a movie communicates to you beyond story, beyond words and themes — that’s what is unique to cinema.

The Shining does that extremely well but, of course, there’s all these ideas in there too — the concepts of afterlife and recurring existence being two of them.

Martyrs is perhaps the best example of extreme horror striving for the sublime philosophically and religiously. It’s arguably the most brutally violent film I’ve seen, but what it left me feeling and thinking about afterward had much more to do with the ineffable meaning of suffering than anything else.

Poltergeist is an ideological pro‑family movie. Is there any movie that is more of a tribute and celebration of a nuclear family than Poltergeist? I’m not sure.

Scott Myers: That’s a great segue to some of your movies. I like to delve into three of them that you directed. Let’s start with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a 2005 movie. Great cast, Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Jennifer Carpenter.

The IMDb plot summary, “A lawyer takes on a negligent homicide a case involving a priest who performed an exorcism on a young girl.” That’s loosely based on actual set of events involving ‑‑ I may mispronounce this ‑‑ Anneliese Michel, I think…

Scott Derrickson: That’s correct, yeah.

Scott Myers: …in Germany in the ’70s. When did you first become aware of that particular story?

Scott Derrickson: The 2014 movie I made for Jerry Bruckheimer Deliver Us From Evil was first written in, I think, 2004. I was just a writer. I wasn’t the director on the project at the time.

While I was doing research for that script, I came across an out‑of‑print book that was only on reserve at the LA Public Library — I was unable to find another single copy of it anywhere. It’s called The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel and was written by an anthropologist — it’s a fascinating study of this event which took place in Bavaria in the ’70s. Nobody knew about the story. I’d never heard of it. When I read it, I thought, “This might be the best idea for a movie I’ve ever come across.”

The author, at that time, was still alive. I optioned the book from her directly for $100. She was amazed that I had found it. I don’t think anybody had brought up that book to her in 30 years. She sent me all 43 original exorcism cassette tape recordings, and a bunch of photographs that the priests involved in the case had given to her.

Some of that you can find online now. It was so horrifying to me. It’s bone‑chillingly scary, what I heard heard on those tapes and saw in those pictures, but it’s also gut‑wrenchingly tragic. The confusion that it gave me was what ultimately drove me to try to make it into a movie, because I just could not make sense of it. There was no point of view that I could take on it that made any sense.

I could look at it as a religious person, as a person of belief, and it didn’t really make any sense. I could look at it as a purely medical, psychological tragedy. But that didn’t make real sense to me either. There was no easy way to reckon with the facts of what actually happened. That’s why it seemed worth making — because it raised such important questions for me.

Scott Myers: It’s nice you say that because one thing I found intriguing about it is how you treated the story, you got these two sides. You’ve got the scientific, psychological side and the religious side, but you present both with such credibility that, by the end, you’re not pitting them against each other.

Really, we’re left with the possibility that either or even both could be seen as a reasonable explanation for her life and death. Were you actually consciously going for that, trying to create that?

Scott Derrickson: Definitely. I have great fondness for that movie, but I honestly think I either moderately succeeded at what you’re talking about or possibly even failed at it. It was the water‑cooler discussion movie for a while after its release — you can’t watch it and not come out of the theater and have conversations about it.

So in that respect, I succeeded. But I think that I failed in the silliest and stupidest of ways, in that while I had both the prosecution and the defense present cogent and articulate points of view, I think most viewers felt that the movie was heavily weighted toward the defense, toward the argument that this girl was not only possessed but a kind of modern saint.

The prosecutor is a person of faith — Campbell Scott’s character — and he’s arguing against the reality of possession and exorcism. The defense attorney played by Lauren Linney is a skeptic, but she’s taking the position in court that possession is a real phenomenon, and exorcism was a legitimate way to treat the girl’s condition. I thought that was a really good idea. But the mistake that I made was not making Campbell Scott’s character more likable. Too many people thought he was the villain, not to be believed.

Half the problem was his damn mustache. I knew it as soon as we had the first test screening. I was shocked at how many people referred to him as the villain and literally referred to his mustache. The funniest comment I’ve ever gotten after a test screening was from that first screening of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The written question for the test audience was, “What, if anything, did you not like about the movie?” Somebody wrote in response, “I didn’t like it when the evil villain, Snidely Whiplash, tied that poor girl to the train tracks and twirled his ugly mustache.”

When I read it, I was like, “Oh man, I really blew it by letting him have that mustache.” I thought it was interesting because he was a character who just didn’t care what other people thought about him. He liked his mustache. But it made him too unlikeable. Maybe it was my own bias coming through subconsciously in an act of sabotage.

If I had made him as likable and as appealing as Laura Linney, the movie would’ve been better and would have better communicated that complex duel perspective, because the fact is, he makes a more cogent argument than she does.

If I was on that jury and I was listening to these arguments, even with my own beliefs being what they are, I would likely have sided with him given that his argumentation is more rational. But audiences experience characters emotionally. If they don’t like a character, they’re not…It’s just like it is in the real world — if a jury doesn’t like a lawyer, they’re going to have a hard time buying into what he’s saying. It’s just human nature.

Scott Myers: That’s so great. I never would’ve made the connection between The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Dudley Do‑Right.

[laughter]

Scott Derrickson: I can’t believe after all these years, I can still quote that comment card line.

Scott Myers: There was The Exorcist, then there were subsequent sequels, but the intriguing twist to this particular film is that you merged the exorcism storyline with a courtroom drama. Was that something that appealed to you upfront? Did you think that would be an interesting, merging the two?

Scott Derrickson: Yeah, that was the hook. That was what made me want to do it. Nobody had ever made a courtroom horror film before. I’d seen a lot of great horror films and I’d seen a lot of great courtroom movies, but nobody had ever put those two genres together.

Because it had never been done before, it was a little frightening to the studios though. I remember meeting with one studio head who said to me, “I really love this, but I’m nervous about it, you know? Tell me how it is that you’re going to go from the horror film to the courtroom film. How are you going to make that work?”

I remember saying, “Well, I’ll show a really scary horror movie scene, and then we’ll cut to the courtroom, and they’ll talk about it. Then when that over, we’ll move into another scary scene. Then, when that’s over, we’ll cut back to the courtroom.” I thought, “Oh dear, this studio head is going to think I’m making fun of him.”

I didn’t know how else to explain it, because you either got it or you didn’t. He didn’t buy it. Luckily, the people at Sony Screen Gems did get it. To them, it met that fresh plus familiar recipe that studios like. All the elements in it were familiar, but the way it was put together was very fresh. That was, in the end, I think, why it got made.

Scott Myers: Yeah, similar but different.

Scott Derrickson: Similar but different.

Scott Myers: The protagonists in the three movies — The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and Doctor Strange — have a similar arc. There’s a widening of their universe from rationalist, realist, materialist or whatnot to somebody who is more open to the possibility of a more magical, mysterious world.

It reminded me of a verse in the gospels, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” It’s as if maybe, in a way, one of the things that might be underlying your storytelling instincts is to say to people, “Look, open up your spiritual eyes to the fact that the universe is a much more mystical place than we imagine.” Do you think that’s a fair comment?

Scott Derrickson: It’s fair to say, yes. That just in my DNA. Given my religious conversion when I was young, my high school years within strict fundamentalism, and then attending at an evangelical college, I think my desire to propagate my own point of view may be impossible to extract. I wish I could.

I believe strongly that as a filmmaker, I shouldn’t set out to communicate to the audience something that I think they need. Who am I to think that what I believe, or what I know, or what I experience is so important and so significant that, literally, millions of people who are going to pay to see this movie, ought to listen to what I have to say about life? I want them to share my emotional experience, not my point of view.

As I’m aging, I’m trying hard to push myself to creatively discover the meaning of the stories I tell, rather than trying to express something. I’m trying to deepen my own awareness of the mystery of life and respect it, appreciate it, and embrace it because that enriches my life when I do that, and for me, directing is a part of that.

Each of those movies that you mentioned were a profound filmmaking experiences that I was personally transformed by. Even though there’s a part of me that’s always going to have to work hard to resist thinking that my views or my ideas are worth listening to, I try hard not to do that. I’d rather challenge my own point of view in making a movie than directly expressing it.

I try to respect the creative process and put to the test what I believe and see what growth there is in the story for me to learn from, and how this story can expand me. If it enriches and resonates with me, then hopefully it will do the same for the audience. Those three movies did that, I think. I was a different person by the end of each of those three films because of the writing and directing of them.

Scott Myers: Let’s turn to Sinister. The 2012 movie, you co‑wrote and directed. IMDb plot summary: “Washed‑up true‑crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, finds a box of super 8 home movies that suggest the murder he is currently researching is the work of a serial killer whose work dates back to the 1960s.” What was the inspiration for this movie?

Scott Derrickson: For me, the inspiration for that movie was the depression, fear, and anxiety that I felt for two years following the failure of The Day the Earth Stood Still. That was a big studio movie that was very hard to work on, and was a very difficult process. The writer’s strike happened while we were in prep.

I got along alright with the studio — it wasn’t like some big combative fight situation. It was just that the script for Day the Earth Stood Still, written by a very talented writer, never had a chance to get where it needed to go. For legal reasons involving a lawsuit against me by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, I got stuck making a movie that I didn’t have much confidence in. And it shows.

So after finishing that movie, I took a severe critical beating. It was a global financial success but not a domestic financial success — and the domestic number is the sexy number. It really wrecked my career. I felt that my career may be over. For two years, the only things I was getting offered to direct were bad movies and weak sequels that would’ve ended my career forever had I made them.

But then Jason Blum came to me with a proposition. This was before Jason Blum was Jason Blum of Blumhouse. Really, all he had done at that point was discover Paranormal Activity. I don’t think Insidious had even come out yet. He was a huge fan of Emily Rose. He said, “I’ll give you three million dollars to do a horror film. You can have final cut. You can make it whatever you want.”

I felt like this was finally the opportunity to make something completely uncompromising. If it’s going to be the last movie I ever make, I thought, it’s going to be my movie. If I have to die on a sword again, it’s going to be my sword that I die on. That was my attitude.

So when it came to the writing of Sinister, I was creating a character that was representing a lot of the worst feelings, instincts and fears that were in me at the time. A lot of the worst aspects of myself.

I was an Oswalt character. I related to him so much. I was very honest with Ethan about that, which is why I think Ethan looks so much like me in the movie. By his own choosing, he grew a goatee and literally bought the same brand of glasses as me.

But in writing and directing it, I was in a place where I felt…After the failure of Day the Earth Stood Still, I felt so much more anxiety than I wanted to feel. I felt ashamed of how scared I was about my career. I hated the fact that I was so afraid that I was going to lose my status as a filmmaker. I was going to lose my financial security. I was going to lose my identity of being successful. I was facing those fears and anxieties about my own ambition. I was facing the fact that these things mattered way more to me than I’d ever want to admit.

So that’s where my contribution to that character comes from. It comes from me trying to reckon with these undesirable aspects of myself all within the context of a story that was brought to me by my writing partner Cargill.

He and I just happen to run into each other in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay at 3:00 in the morning. He pitched me the story idea when I was already working on a separate idea for Jason Blum. He just pitched me the basic story of the guy who goes up to the attic and finds these murders on on Super 8 film.

I felt like it was one of the best concepts I’d heard for a horror film, so I scrapped the idea I was working on, and we wrote Sinister together. From that first meeting, to the filming and editing of the film, to the completion of the sound mix, was less than a year. Then it came out, and was a big hit. That never happens.

It was a beautiful experience and a huge recovery for me both personally and professionally. Doctor Strange is a very personal movie, but I doubt that I’ll ever make any movie that’s as personal and revealing, and not in a good way, as Sinister.

Scott Myers: Wow! That really is an insight into Ellison’s character because he’s a writer who had had success just several years before. Now he and his wife have this argument where he says, “This is bigger than In Cold Blood. This is my shot.” This unfolding mystery, the obsession with trying to get back to the mountaintop.

Scott Derrickson: Exactly. Something else I so love about Sinister is how collaborative it was. That line you just quoted “This is my shot!” was an improv line by Ethan. The In Cold Blood reference was in the script. It’s a big speech in a single, long take, and Ethan just threw that in there. It’s so great. He was just so inspired in that particular take. It all just flowed out of him, and it becomes a defining moment for his character.

To me, what Sinister is really about is a guy who’s profoundly afraid of losing his own status and identity as a successful writer, along with his financial security. He’s so afraid of that his fear even drives him to ignore the horrific things that are happening around him. [laughs] It drives him to ignore the fact that he should turn these films over to the police.

That was when he makes his deal with the devil — when he decides, “I’m not gonna call the sheriff. I’m not gonna tell them about this. I’m gonna use this.” He’s lying to his wife already about living in the crime scene house. As things escalate, and his kids start acting weird and doing terrifying things, and he’s getting really scared because he knows something’s going on in the house — it still doesn’t scare him as much as losing his position in the world. That scares him more. Fear‑driven ambition is what that movie is really about.

Scott Myers: At this point, your children are probably similar ages to the two kids in the movie. How much of your identification with the character is about that, too?

Ellison really is in danger of forsaking the primary function of being a parent, which is your family’s safety. At one point, he says, “Writing is what gives my life meaning.” Tracy, his wife, says, “Writing isn’t the meaning of your life. Your kids are your legacy.”

Scott Derrickson: Yes, that’s his legacy and the legacy of any parent. By the way, I should probably just throw this out — if I had to pick a favorite scene from all the things that I’ve ever made, I think that argument between Ellison and his wife played by Juliet Rylance is probably my favorite scene. There’s just so much to it. You rarely get scenes like that in horror movies.

I do think that making Sinister was an emotional and spiritual and relational purge for me. In making that movie, I managed, again, to experience this kind of reckoning with evil. The things that that the character was wrestling with, I was genuinely wrestling with. I felt that same fear. But not anymore. And not because Sinister was successful. Before it was even released I felt like I had gotten rid of this diseased tendency to find my identity in being a successful director. The anxieties that I felt before making it had gone away.

And that has remained. If it hadn’t, I don’t think I would have dealt very well with the critical and box office success of Doctor Strange, nor the critical and financial failure of the movie I made before that, Deliver Us From Evil. What matters to me about both of those films is that I made what I intended to make. I hit my target. Neither the success of one nor the failure of the other had much of an emotional impact on me. And that’s because before those two movies, I’d made Sinister. And it changed me.

I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it’s true. I just grew through that experience. I never again want the meaning or satisfaction of my life to rise and fall with the success or failure of my movies. “My kids are my legacy.”

Scott Myers: I was reminded of two things. One, another Biblical verse, that verse in the gospels, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the world, but forfeits his soul.”

Scott Derrickson: Some of the greatest words ever spoken. Every time I hear that particular verse quoted, it hits me in the chest. Maybe the greatest warning ever for someone working in Hollywood.

Scott Myers: The other thing is, are you much a fan of Carl Jung? Have you studied him at all?

Scott Derrickson: Yes, definitely, particularly his writings on dreams and his theories of synchronicity.

Scott Myers: Here’s my take on this. The Jungian take on Sinister and your experience there, because of what you described to me. I think he would say, “That very clearly was a case of individuation.” The concept of the shadow which is in rather simplistic terms, the dark negative aspects of an individual psyche.

We typically try to repress them or deny them, but his thing is that you’ve got to explore them. You’ve got to open them up to the light. You’ve got to bring them into the light of consciousness, or else they will hold power over you.

We see in a lot of these movies, and not just horror movies, that for the protagonist, the nemesis character is the physicalization of that shadow dynamic. You’ve got this Mr. Boogie character, the eater of children. As I’m watching this movie, I’m thinking, “This father, he’s literally putting his children in harm’s way.”

His obsession with writing success is eating away at the time with his children, his parental responsibility. My unique theory is Mr. Boogie a projection of Ellison’s shadow?

Scott Derrickson: Yes. That’s very astute. I can’t say that I thought of it in those literal terms. Boy, do I like that read! [laughs] It certainly sounds right to me.

Scott Myers: Feel free to use it.

Scott Derrickson: Yeah. I’ll take credit for it, thanks. It’s definitely on point. Ellison conjured this child-eating monster into his life, he really did. It’s on him.

Scott Myers: Jumping to Doctor Strange, it’s my favorite of the Marvel movies. I’m not saying that to blow smoke, I just thought it was so well told because of the mysticism, the spirituality, and stuff like that.

The fundamental thing about Stephen Strange that I resonated with is that he doesn’t get an atomic heart. He’s not bitten by a spider. He isn’t born with superhero strength. He’s just a flawed human being on this journey. That ability for Doctor Strange to become who he is, he has to go inside and discover that stuff.

It’s not a superhero story so much as a hero’s journey story. Do you see it like that?

Scott Derrickson: I do. It makes him much more vulnerable in many ways than any other superhero. You stab him with a knife, you’re going to kill him. For me, Doctor Strange was always about two things, the secondary one being the mind‑bending visuals and the mysticism inspired by the comics.

But the primary thing is Strange’s human journey of personal growth. While shooting, I had written on the front of my script, a quote by Thomas a Kempis: “Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself?”

Both in the comics and in the movie, Strange isn’t trying to overcome a villain or trying to utilize power for victory. He’s really just wrestling with himself the whole time. And when he finally grows enough to make a clever, but very self-sacrificial decision, that’s what’s heroic to me. Growing into selflessness.

Scott Myers: Yeah, like Campbell said, “A hero is someone who gives himself over to something bigger than himself.”

Scott Derrickson: That’s it. That’s what the movie is about.

Scott is repped by WME and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Twitter/X: @scottderrickson

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