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Along with its enchanting and exquisite melodies, West Side Story has attitude and a tremendous amount of frenetic energy. It's emotional, theatrical and technical. It's everything.

I was about seven or eight years old when I first heard West Side Story, and it had a huge impact on me. If you look at the elements of that record, it contains many of the things I enjoy doing today.

My mom and dad are New Yorkers who left the tenement streets of the Bronx and came to Los Angeles when 'West Side Story' was real. They have the scars to prove it.

But, you know there's a lot of westerns - not that they were bad - it's just that they can be remade because they're great stories that aren't indelible in an audience's mind when it comes to both the cast and the story.

New York feels like the whole city is into dance music. That's not how it felt when I was younger. There was more of a hipster scene.

'Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in.

I had the advantage of reading the book, and when the script was first submitted to me, it was just another gangster story - the east side taking over the west side and all that.

I'm not really a big musical fan. I enjoyed 'West Side Story' when it came out, but it gets a bit tired in the end.

New York had this wild beat that anybody could dance to. It was very nurturing to young people.