Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.

You’ve got to work. You’ve got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.

If you’re doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can’t do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

I don’t think of it as a competition – which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.

I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that’s more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It’s something else that has nothing to do with what you’ve done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.

As a first-time director in America, I feel I’ve been very fortunate.

I’ve made movies that cost less than one car chase.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore – which is a great shame, but I’d love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don’t want to see black and white.

The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It’s about what goes on before the movie starts.