I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.

When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.

I've only ever gone into studio films with people I really like.

In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?".

I have no problems with the NC-17 rating. I want more NC-17 films. More adult cinema!

We were very clear that this film's [Young Adam] so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate.