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I believe the director's primary role is to create an atmosphere where his company can be created.

A lot of really good directors have a killer in them, as if they'd do anything to get that image. But that comes with the terrain and I don't mind it.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

Any time you talk about the look of the film, it's not just the director and the director of photography. You have to include the costume designer and the production designer.

There is often a great disparity between a director's personal style and the movies he makes.

Sometimes the producer has more say and the director takes what he is given. On other occasions, you don't see the producer very much and the director is the one who it is all about.

What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.

I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.

What's nice about what we have is when you enter the set, the world of film, it becomes this real cocoon, very different from all the publicity. That's the fun part.