It's so hard to do anything that doesn't owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably already done before. It always seem like we're falling behind whatever he came up with. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) - that was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that every time you go to make a film, you're desperate to either do it better than you did it last time or to not repeat yourself.

I'm not really a Sundance baby, but they helped me so much I feel I have to acknowledge it.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

There’s a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.

It's a gamble you take, the risk of alienating an audience. But there's a theory - sometimes it's better to confuse them for five minutes than let them get ahead of you for 10 seconds.

So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.