The clock is impotent; mechanical time does not affect those living in an eternal present..

I don't think it's very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting..

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art..

Let's just shoot in black and white. Don't explain why. Have no reason for it. Just do it because it's interesting..

I get bored very easily. I find most movies boring. I go to movies and ask, "How do they stay awake making this?".

There's no escape. I'm God's only man..

One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems..

You can't take contradiction away. Part of the fun of it is that the contradiction never really quite goes away..

There's something wrong - the performance, the weather, the set design, the lighting. Something is not working. And so you say, "Give me 10 minutes."….

I was looking for people who didn't have any preconceptions about films, what I call the "post-rules" generation..

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment..

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more s….

All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all original….

I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine-driven. And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue ab….

I had this whole issue of doing a crime film in the 2010s. The genre's been mined very, very heavily. Post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie….

The only economic paradigm that movies have ever known is capitalism. There were no church sponsors or state patronage. The idea was that if you'd pa….

I want to be happy; why do I do things that make me unhappy?.

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to t….

As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung..

The best advice is essentially that thing in the back of your mind that you really aren't sure of, and when you start to hear other people bring up t….