With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

I didn't really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.

If your work is going to draw from life, you'd better work very hard to keep up with reality.

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.