Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas in the past they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy.

Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it.

The one thing you know when you're shooting a script - and I've been on a lot of sets - is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.

It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.