I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.

I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.

During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.

There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.

One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can't burn him.

The more you see, especially being young, the more you see the past, the more you can draw upon that and the more you can make the present and the future. It's how you process the past and at oftentimes in the picture, there are references to certain imagery from certain pictures, and certain novels.