“Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate ...” — Quentin Tarantino Quote

Australian genre films were a lot of fun because they were legitimate genre movies. They were real genre films, and they dealt, in a way like the Italians did, with the excess of genre, and that has been an influence on me.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.

I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.

As Australian palates continue to be curious and enquiring, so does the variety and regional specificity of cuisine options.

For me, being Australian is having the opportunity to be your best. This country, this state, gives us every opportunity we could hope for.