I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other.

Almost every other Western in the last ten years has failed, since Dances with Wolves.

You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.

I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

I tell you, I feel like a real novice as far as horror goes.

That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

And you know, when you take on something like this, you read a book like this, you know that it's going to be an adventure. That's part of what draws you to it.

I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.

I mean, I really liked those guys and the experience of doing Raiders was really good for me, but I did not really want to be involved - I only did Jedi, as I really owed George a favor.

I didn't really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.

It's hard enough to get any movie made, and when you take on these tough genres - and I've done it a couple times - it just makes the whole struggle more.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.

What you hope for, like Unforgiven did a lot to give you a chance to do it again sometime.

You know, Stephen says, in the movies no one ever goes to the bathroom. They shave, they brush their teeth. He goes right at this sort of funny taboo we have about the bathroom, and he turned it into this nightmare, you know, your worst fear of what's in there.

I really liked Carrie a lot. That was one of Brian De Palma's best movies.

The great thing about Stephen is that he sees the movie as a separate thing, I think. He wants it to capture the essence of the book, and if he feels that's been done, then he's not too particular about the details. I think that's why he's happy.

I haven't seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven't seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it - see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.

We're gonna try and bring on all the different aspects of horror movie making and bring on guests and show all these old '50's B movies. Not the real corny ones, the real cool ones.

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris, like Alien had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

A win by an unsound combination, however showy, fills me with artistic horror.

You're going through the horror of it, you're going through the isolation of it but you're being empowered by reminding yourself that you're connected to everybody else.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

There is an element of anger among women who've been raped. There's certainly a major element of humiliation. But it really does seem like a medical condition of shock and horror.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

Horror does not interest me, and so I know little of its practicioners, old or current.

For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.

All of us have our individual curses, something that we are uncomfortable with and something that we have to deal with, like me making horror films, perhaps.

This is an area you always need to address when you're dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness - which there isn't in other horror characters.

I have done some short pieces that are not horror.

I think what sets this one apart is that there are two horror movie icons finally battling each other. You actually see them beat the crap out of each other instead of just terrorizing the kids in the movie.

I saw 'Food, Inc.' last night - it was like a horror movie. I'm definitely thinking about my food supply now and how I want to grow my own.

I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining, I was terrified - I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set.

You can't make people believe in you if you play a horror part with your tongue in your cheek.

I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

I loved Alien, and I loved Carrie, and I loved The Exorcist - those were big movies for me. They were just brilliantly done, and unusual, and they all took horror to some new place.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them!

I've been reading horror since I was five years old.

I had to get used to wearing a mask and wearing a prosthetic and performing with those things while singing and expressing myself through stylized movement, while keeping it as human as possible so the audience could be closer to the horror of the Phantom.