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.

Of course, we talked about Westerns we like with [James Ransone in Valley of Violence] , but it was always thematically in relation to the movie and what the themes of the movie were.

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

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."

It's not the plot [of Valley of Violence] - the plot is the reason to get all these things to happen, all these character moments to happen. It was always meant to have these two perspectives.

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?

You want to be able to say [to Ethan Hawke's character], "Dude, it's okay," but maybe it's not. Maybe he's not a good person. I don't know. That's the thing about people. There is no real good guy or bad guy [in A Valley Of Violence]. It's all context.