You know that certain things that you use in the film are going to be shown to audiences five hundred times before they ever sit down to watch the movie. So you have to kind of modulate what can I do to give marketing enough material but that I can still withhold certain things so that it's fresh and surprising for the audience coming to see the movie.

I love films like Deliverance where you can watch it over and over again and decode all of its many different meanings.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd.

Directing has completely changed the way I write and watch films.

Normally, I tend to be a very binary filmmaker. You give me a problem and a destination and I say, "All right. If you want to get from here to here, there's a series of if/then's that will get you there. And if you have other stuff you want to do along the way, I'll give you all the if/then's that are caused by that."