The situation in the film is like me going out to Venice Beach and talking to a homeless guy on the boardwalk, and 13 years later he's the president.

All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one.

Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.

I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.

Not only is America a country where torture is now policy. It's now outsourced. It's given to companies at a cost-plus basis. It's a triple whammy of surreal, absolute madness.

Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.

Radical Islam and US exceptionalism are in bed with each other. They're like lovers, methinks.