Ethan [Hawke] just - they got along great. He got to act with a dog, for real, and it felt like Jumpy was acting with him. It was a surreal thing to watch. When you watch the movie [Valley of Violence], you just kind of accept it. But if you do think about how we show - there's a dog and a movie star interacting - and you buy it. That's crazy.

It's this long monologue [in Valley of Violence] with Ethan Hawke talking about life and everything with a dog. That's not in movies. Hopefully when people think about the movie when they go home, they're like, "That's weird. He's maybe crazy. He's talking to a dog the whole time."

Older actresses apparently have no sense of humor about being older actresses.

Technology has just been the major progression of the last 15 years - instant communication. That stuff has gone so global. That's what's interesting about it. When someone sits down in front of a computer, it's the same everywhere in the world, and it's the same screen looking back at you with the same Google, and there's no individuality to it. So I decided it would be kind of visually uninteresting to have in my films.

With my horror movies or with this movie [Valley of Violence], same thing. The subtext of this movie is what to take away from it. Plot is never something that's been my driving force as a filmmaker.

It's funny, because I don't think of my films as "slow-burn." I don't even know if I was familiar with the phrase until people started labeling me with it.

In general, I go to see the stuff that for me is, "Thank God for that actor, he's doing something that I never imagined; thank God for this filmmaker, because if this person didn't exist, this movie wouldn't exist." That's why I go to the movies. That, to me, is what's so exciting about this movie.