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

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.

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.

We can't make a giant sprawling movie. We're going to make a small movie. And what we got is what I could get, performance-wise.

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.

They're both [Ethan Hawke and John Travolta] so good. It's hard to explain. But they're consummate professionals and you see the little choices they make - you see it in their eye. You see these little details they do where you go, "That's why they're them."

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.