There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.

I think what happened there was just the budget would be too big to build these sets because nothing really exists here in New York of that period; you have to build it all.

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.

I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.

I've been extremely lucky to work with Elmer Bernstein, Howard Shore over the years, but I've always imagined films with my own scores, because I don't come from that world or that period of filmmaking. And so how could I make up my own score on a film like this where it isn't necessarily made up of popular music from the radio or the period; it isn't necessarily classical music. But what if it's modern symphonic music?

And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.