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.

I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.

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.

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

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

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.