"When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir  I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is."