[I was] feeling like I'd done something horrible, "I'm a despicable person and I'm perverse," and all these things, to a sense of the power and the necessity, in a sense, of horror films and dealing with dark material.

I think the important thing about staying creative and staying sharp and original is not to look back too much.

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn't matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

It's quite rare that you make something and think that you did something that no-one else had done.

People who are kind of at the cutting edge of life and survival, and being near the nitty-gritty, like my films, and I like that.

I have felt over the years a definite progression or arc from feeling guilty about what I had done with the first one [film], because certainly there was all that fundamentalist guilt that came pouring back in.

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war.