I'm a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I'd been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene... I just thought I'd go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

In some movies you feel like you're a very small part of a huge machine. Whereas in the theater you can have a very small part, but you can still feel the weight and the gravity of it. Given the nature of theater, it's a more concentrated and quiet experience.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

If I have to produce movies, direct movies, whatever to change the way Hollywood treats older women, I'll do it. If I have to bend the rules, I will. If I have to break them, I will.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

I love making movies, but there's nothing like being in front of an audience.

So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.

With actors like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Harrison Ford, what made them such icons is that even in dramatic movies, their characters had a sense of humor.