I like movies that leave things in the hands of the audience.

I found Jumpy on YouTube. I wrote a movie about a guy with a dog and was like, "What have I done? This is going to be a nightmare. We're a small movie and we're never going to be able to do this."

I just really like seeing mundane stuff in movies. It's realistic.

[Valley of Violence] was written for James Ransone. PJ's a friend of mine, I've known him for a long time, he's always like, "Dude, when are we going to make a movie together?" I finally called him.

I wrote [Valley of Violence] entirely with James Ransone in mind. I get such a joy out of watching his performance and seeing people watch this. He's so great. The bravado thing and the foolishness, he does them both so well. It's weird because he's so hateable in the movie, but in the end, you're also going, "I feel bad for him." That's hard to do. It's hard to do that to where you're like, "This guy's the worst, but I know why he's the worst, so it's a shame this is happening." That's the whole thing.

It's not the plot [of Valley of Violence] - the plot is the reason to get all these things to happen, all these character moments to happen. It was always meant to have these two perspectives.

If you ever see the director pulling people aside, that means something's not working. Because you're trying to figure out why it's not working. But we would show up, we would talk about it.