There are certain things that happen during the production of, I think, every film, that you didn't plan, and often it's better than what you did plan. There's the question of either going with it or not.

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.

The studios are making fewer films. They are making more expensive films. Profits are tougher to come by. Not only because of the expense of production. But also because of the expense of promotion and hype. To boil that all down, it's more about hype than it is about filmmaking.

And it was only a week later that I realized a close up of Steve McQueen was worth the greatest landscape you could find.

I've seen my own films close to a thousand times in one form or another. When you edit them. When you shoot them. Then you run them over and over again for sound and music. Then you'd go to premiere screenings, and have to do promotional screenings in other cities. I can't watch any of my old films.

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

Violence is not funny.