With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.

I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

My process is very disempowering to the director anyway, so it's essential that you be respectful. Once we've sort of found the scene, I have to get out of there, because you don't want to split the actor's idea of who's in charge.