Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.

I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that.

The action stuff takes a long time but when you're there and you're doing it and you go into that take and you run and everything is blowing up around you and you're diving onto something it's actually incredibly thrilling and you feel like a kid again. Like a kid, who used to play and pretend all those things would happen and now they're actually happening.

As a director you have to be careful you don't over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.

I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.