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

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

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.

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.

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

And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.