Cannes Film Fest 2007–The film is clearly rooted in a specific and familiar genre–the police movie–but I wanted to do something more focused on character and emotion. The genre is a point of departure to tell a story about a man caught by his destiny, fate, and the complex and internally conflicted emotions that love, loss, and betrayal yield–James Gray

Cannes Film Fest 2007–I started wondering, who would actually like to be in my shoes I began thinking about a guy who lives in the suburbs and would cut his right arm off to have this sort of attention, and would love to speak to reporters about himself. Out of this came the character of Jean Marc, who would see it as fun to be interviewed, albeit in a fantasy life he would love to live, which has no basis whatsoever in reality. That‚Äôs how the story came at first, and I built on it from there–Denys Arcand

Cannes Film Fest 2007–The movie is not about skateboarding culture; it uses it as a backdrop. It's about one teenager's life and how teens interact, or don't–Gus Van Sant

Cannes Film Fest 2007–We need to eliminate private health insurance companies. That's the biggest single impediment to making sure everybody who needs to be taken care of receives the help they require. The pharmaceutical companies should also be highly regulated, like ConEd. A lot of people need medicine to survive, but it's criminal to allow pharmaceutical companies to jack up prices and make it impossible for some people to get the drugs they need to live‚Äî-Michael Moore

Cannes Film Fest 2007–There is a good deal of humor in the book, although you wouldn‚Äôt call it a humorous novel, exactly. It‚Äôs certainly very dark ‚Äìand that was our defining characteristic. The book is also quite violent, quite bloody. So the movie is probably the most violent we‚Äôve ever made. In that respect it reflects the novel, I hope, fairly accurately–Joel Coen