One of my favorite scenes of the movie [Valley of Violence] is when Ethan Hawke is sitting at the campfire with the dog.

It's unreal. I mean, the dog backflips. It's amazing. Google Jumpy on YouTube - I had seen the dog first and I was like, "Y'all don't even know."

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.

All those awkward moments - that's on the cast for doing such an amazing job. I think it was funny on the page, but when they did it, you definitely went, "Oh!" Watching it with a crowd that, like you said, was not expecting it to be funny, but then genuinely finding it funny, is totally a credit to their performances.

It's Ethan Hawke and John Travolta [in Valley of Violence]. It's awesome. They're awesome.

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."

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.