The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.

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.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

There's no escape. I'm God's only man.

The clock is impotent; mechanical time does not affect those living in an eternal present.

One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems.

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