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.

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.

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 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 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.

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

It's hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres - and I've done it a couple times - it just makes the whole struggle more.