If people don't like [my film], the ship's sailed. There's nothing I can do about that.

Humor is more so. For this, there's definitely moments that I think, "I know this part is really funny and I want to see people laugh." And they do and you go, "Yesss." That's really satisfying, because I'm so proud of the performances in the movie and everybody worked so hard.

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.

I think you make the movie in your head that you have to make, and you have to get it out of you. You have all these pretentious reasons why you want to do it, and you set out to accomplish them. And you think "This is important for what I'm trying to accomplish for the story," and I think those reasons will come through to an audience, and they will find it. That's the best you can do.

Older actresses apparently have no sense of humor about being older actresses.

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.

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.