As a horror movie fan, I was very obsessed with horror films. Still am. I love the genre. For me, horror films are opera, and they are... instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it's Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. It is when the stakes are at their absolute largest in a story: whether somebody is going to live or die. In a way, it's just holding up a mirror to life.

Anybody who is capable of doing terrible things, you don't want them out in the world, but you can't help but respect their ingenuity and their savvy and their intelligence as they go about their dastardly deeds.

We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.

Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.

It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.

It's very interesting to blur the line between eating human beings and eating animals, because I do think people should think more about what they put in their bodies, whether it is nutritionally or philosophically.