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.

It's very important to me to find ways to relate the audience to the characters. This is the first thing to go in most mainstream horror films.

[Valley of Violence] was written for James Ransone. PJ's a friend of mine, I've known him for a long time, he's always like, "Dude, when are we going to make a movie together?" I finally called him.

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

If you ever see the director pulling people aside, that means something's not working. Because you're trying to figure out why it's not working. But we would show up, we would talk about it.

You get to actually make your movie. As a filmmaker, that's the dream. That's why you get up in the morning, to be able to do that. You feel constrained sometimes, but if the movie makes sense in the budget realm, then it isn't hard.

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.