Tommy Nohilly, who plays Tubby [ Valley of Violence], he came down to see the movie for the first time and I was like, "You've got to come just to see people react to your [big scene]." I knew that would go well, but it's satisfying to me when he's sitting there and it actually does.

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 just really like seeing mundane stuff in movies. It's realistic.

I have a romantic comedy I'd love to make, but I can't get the money for it. It's hard to get people to give you money for an arty romantic comedy when you've done a horror movie. So I can just sit there and keep complaining about that, or I can go make another horror movie this year. People will get behind me on that, because I'm relatively bankable. As long as I can do my own thing with it, I'll keep doing it.

I mean PJ - James Ransone - he was a friend of mine, he probably heard all this stuff, but for the rest of the cast [Valley of Violence], we mostly just talked about their characters and things like that. That was the business at hand.

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.

With my horror movies or with this movie [Valley of Violence], same thing. The subtext of this movie is what to take away from it. Plot is never something that's been my driving force as a filmmaker.