Nobody has shot a strip club in black and white in a long time.

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.

Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

That's just my disposition - to create a situation where you have to come up with something.

All the animals come out at night.

I had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie, what do you do? I wasn't attracted to pulp so much as all of a sudden I had a pulp problem. I had to find a way to make this interesting, because there's a lot of crime films that come out on VOD every week, and a number of these star Nicolas Cage.