Film is a battleground.

You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open, and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point

Extending the language of film sometimes starts with just trying to show one true thing.

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.

If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.

If your first scene doesn't give you a hard on, throw it out!