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Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

We see death constantly on film.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

The subject of death is taboo. We feel, perhaps only subconsciously, that to be in contact with death in any way, even indirectly, somehow confronts us with the prospect of our own deaths, draws our own deaths closer and makes them more real and thinkable.

When someone dies instantly, then I think the well of grief and disbelief all mixed in with it is unfathomable. And when murder is involved, that just takes it into a whole new place. There is an extra dimension you just can't compute or deal with.

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible.