I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

I wouldn't presume to be God's point of view.

I just - I kind of see it that way. I find the higher angles down. I do - look, you can go back to the staircase shots in "Third Man" or the staircase in "La Dolce Vita." So I just find that visual construction in a frame.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

As you grow older, you change.

Vic Armstrong is, of course, a legend