After"American Beauty" won the Oscar there must have been temptation to quit while you were ahead.
I froze for a bit, in truth - for about six months after the Oscars I thought "what am I going to do now?". There were lots of scripts landing on my desk and ["Road to Perdition"] just appealed to me on so many different levels, but was also completely different to "American Beauty". It's a bigger scale, it was clearly a film that needed these iconic figures in it so it needed movie stars - and anyway it would be unaffordable unless it had them in it. And it was a period film.
Was working with a genuine screen icon like Paul Newman a pressure for you?
The real pressure was when I first met him. I sent him the script and thought "he's going to say no" - he had given an interview saying "I'm doing one more part and that's it". But then he asked to meet and I was very nervous. He tested me very hard over three meetings in his apartment in New York. He wanted to know why I thought the film should be made and what I thought it said and asked about the character - every single full stop and comma was discussed. By the time it came to shooting the film, I had relaxed a bit.
It's a great performance from Tom Hanks too.
I think it's wonderful, it's very contained, very mysterious. One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this.
