I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.

You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.

Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.

If you change a location opportunistically, to gain a day on the schedule, which I did more than once, you have to re-rig everything creatively on the spot, and you not only have to be able to do that, but do it with great fluency to keep moving. I used to go apeshit when anything got changed in a film but you live and learn, and I have learned.

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