Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

Studios are attracted by making money, and they're also trying to simplify things, going with the genre thing. The gambling instincts of a few years ago where you might make some thousands or a few hundred, it's nothing now.

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.

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

I've done a number of things that get categories closed off in a way, so when I read 'The Long Walk' by Slavomir Rawicz and decided to do film, 'I thought, you know, this is going to be wonderful,' two and a half years, three years, whatever it was.

When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'

There's almost a fear that if you understood too deeply the way you arrived at choices, you could become self-conscious. In any case, many ideas which are full of personal meaning seem rather banal when you put words to them.