Success is never bad in Hollywood. It is what you do with success that will dog you.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

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

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

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

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

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."