If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.

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.

A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical.

Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.

The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.

When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.