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I've been a fan of noir films since I was in high school.

But, number one, I think traditional noir doesn't work in contemporary storytelling because we don't live in that world anymore.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

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.

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit: more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect.

When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.