Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

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

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

With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.

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.