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.

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.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.

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.

There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.