Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.

London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.

I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed he thought Americans were the ones on TV. I didn't know you had accents. I didn't know you had a class system. I didn't know you were like us. To which the answer is, probably only where I grew up, but while we're at it don't watch television and think it's the United States of America.

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.

You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.

Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.