I hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

Casting is always subject to availabilities.

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.