It definitely could have been a horror story [Valley of Violence], oh my God, if the dog was impossible. So could the horses.

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."

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.

Humor is more so. For this, there's definitely moments that I think, "I know this part is really funny and I want to see people laugh." And they do and you go, "Yesss." That's really satisfying, because I'm so proud of the performances in the movie and everybody worked so hard.

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

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.

Toby [Huss] gets shot, or that part when [John] Travolta says this, or the part where Ethan [Hawke] says that cool thing - those details are the things that are interesting to me. So just acknowledging we don't have a lot of money [for Valley of Violence], so we're going to make a Western that's kind of contained, but we're going to make it super charismatic and we're going to make it memorable for what it is as opposed to what we couldn't afford.