I always feel like the less you say when you're making a movie, as a director, is the best. That means everything's going great.

I did the movie [Valley of Violence] from two perspectives. You're with Ethan [Hawke] the whole movie, but for the first half, you're really with Ethan. For the second half, you're with him, but also you're with the bad guys because he kind of becomes the bad guy. No one's really good in the movie.

Everything Jumpy could do [in Valley of Violence] was too much. If I put it in the movie you would all check out. When he wraps himself up in the blanket, that's as far as I could go, and that's not even close. The dog's amazing.

To me it's not so much that the movies are slow-paced as much as they are about spending time building a relationship between the audience and the characters. If you don't spend an adequate amount of time doing this, then how can you expect to scare anyone?

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 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.

I do think, even though I've made these genre movies, there's what happens in the movie and then there's what the movie's about. And for me, what the movie's about is so much more interesting.