I'm not sure I understand the compulsion to label things.

I don't go to see movies to see plots. I'm not interested in puzzles like an Agatha Christie story.

Really, I wanted to make a movie [Valley Of Violence] about: How does violence affect people? This is a take from me on how violence affects people.

The first half [of Valley of Violence] was to endear you to all these people and give you all these archetypes that you're familiar with, and then the second half, just to see all those archetypes unravel like real people.

To me, making a horror movie is about how you can present similar genre familiarities, but present them a little bit differently. Part of what interests me is the nonchalant realism of it, because you don't get that in the big studio horror movies. I like seeing someone walk around a house and sift through the drawers, and things like that, because that reminds me of what I would do, and of weird personal choices that people would make. That, in contrast to seeing someone get chased with a knife, makes it all the more interesting.

You want to be able to say [to Ethan Hawke's character], "Dude, it's okay," but maybe it's not. Maybe he's not a good person. I don't know. That's the thing about people. There is no real good guy or bad guy [in A Valley Of Violence]. It's all context.

Typically, in Westerns, people who are in a Western feel like they're in a Western. It's almost like they know they do all these Western things.