It's spiritual, a man that has a past and regrets, but you can as a director take a shot, and there's something in the eyes and the face, you just can't fake it, you can't teach it, and I think Ed Harris has that quality.

You get very little from the studios anymore, it's all independent. And I think the studio, with the exception of something like The Social Network, a fine film, very interesting, but as for studio pictures, that's it, what else? There was more only a few years ago. So it changes, and I'm trying as much as I can.

Anybody I'd spoken to who'd been in Siberia said 'would you please put mosquitos in your film,' that's what everybody knows about, they're big and they're nasty.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.

So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.

I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.