I felt, if I'm going to take on some of the most overdone material, which is men and women and affairs and betrayal of friends, I had better have a new take on it. I think my films come from a desperation not to be boring.

Just in the past few years - since I've been making movies, which isn't a very long time - you now have a culture that is fascinated and informed about the box office in a way that sometimes filmmakers weren't even.

I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis. One example would be the letter writing, or the reading of the letters. If you remember from the book, they find the letters and then in the most undramatic way they take them downstairs, they get approval, they sit at a table during the day with their own author, across from each other.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

There were certain things that I watched, and I screened a series of period films as well, not because I wanted to copy those, because I wanted to be different. “Far from the Madding Crowd” was one I looked to because I thought it looked so good. “Doctor Zhivago.” Unrequited love is always a great thing. “Tess” was something I looked at, I thought Polanski got the period right.

I was very careful to cast guys who were very good-looking and very fit and who had a certain sense of privilege about them, because with that sense of privilege comes contempt.

Without In The Company of Men, I could still be teaching, so who knows if this would've existed.