I can't sit through the superhero films. But I watched Draft Day, and it was kind of sweet in an old-fashioned way.

With The Exorcist we said what we wanted to say. Neither one of us view it as a horror film. We view it as a film about the mysteries of faith. It's easier for people to call it a horror film. Or a great horror film. Or the greatest horror film ever made. Whenever I see that, I feel a great distance from it.

Violence is not funny.

There are films that I've made that I like a little bit more than the others. But the films that I mostly watch, and see over and over again, are not my own.

The studios mostly threw away the negatives of the classic films. They had no interest in their legacy.

In the case of a film like The Exorcist or To Live and Die in L.A., I saw the whole movie in my head before I went to shoot it. I never did storyboards, or anything like that. I had the film in my head.

Style is something that's extremely important, but it must grow naturally out of who and what you are and what the material calls for. It cannot be superimposed.