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

I haven't seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven't seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it - see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.

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.

The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.

I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma's best movies.

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.