Peirce also discusses with Calautti the similarities between the horror genre and her previous films. "Well, Boys Don’t Cry was not exactly a romantic comedy. [laughs] But let’s just say my other movies are cousins of horror. It was fantastic, because I realized – it being the cousin of what I’ve done before, the structure’s the same. I still want you to be terrified, I still want you to be affected viscerally by everything. I still want you to dream, but I can have … there’s a more obvious fun, which is, you know, when the mother’s beating up the daughter I don’t want you to say, 'Oh, I feel bad' like maybe you felt in my other movies. I want you to say, 'Oh, God, that’s great – do it again!' There’s a moment when Margaret hits Carrie with the Bible, and every time I screen it everybody’s like, 'Wow, why do we like that?' Because there’s pleasure in the pain. So it’s about celebrating the pain. It’s a turning of the dial."

Finally, Calautti asks Peirce if she felt any pressure to compete with the famous ending of De Palma's version. "Well," she tells Calautti, "Brian said to me, 'So what are you gonna do about that end?' And I was like, 'Brian, I know you revolutionized cinema …' [laughs] Of course it’s on my mind! I’m not blind to the brilliance of his movie, but I’m also not blind to the fact that I can’t go down a road that he’s done. You have to be mindful. And I just don’t think you have to try to duplicate something that is so unique and so brilliant and revolutionized cinema. I mean, maybe I should be bolder and do it, but I think I’m a little too wise to. So I think you do something different, I think you just make sure your movie is what it is and that it fires on all cylinders as much as you can. And if you find yourself in a situation where you can top it, do it. But you probably won’t."

"The Vietnam War and the assassination of Kennedy made us aware that the government was deceiving us. When we realized that they lied about the war, and when we saw that the government was making excuses for the Kennedy assassination, none of that made sense to our eyes. For us, who trusted in our political leaders, it was a revelation. Today, obviously, we doubt everything they say."

On Redacted:

"With Iraq, we fell, again, to the lie of a war, and we sent kids there helpless to fight for something that they had no idea what it was. They had horrific experiences and then they too responded to them in a terrible way."

On establishing the idea of deception with the viewer:

"Film can be the art of deception. You can create movies that lie and deceive the public with pictures, and there are elements of it in my movies."

On the visual language of motion pictures:

"Many of the images developed in the movies are inspired by the material with which we work, but the advantage of thriller and horror films is that they rely on a specific visual language... Voyeurism is a staple of the cinema. It is intrinsic to the art, because the movie has to do with observing an action: we're pointing a camera at a person who pretends to not have a lens pointed at her... There is a vast reservoir of movies from the past which show how the way to tell a story visually has evolved, something that originated in the silents. We saw what happened when sound came in and made films in static forms, which worsened with television."

On beauty in cinema, and studio resistance:

"Beauty is an important idea for me, and there is not enough beauty in film, because it costs a lot of money to the studios... Making Scarface was a terrible struggle. Studios said it was too violent, and they had immense fear. We always find that kind of resistance in the industry and I don’t believe this has improved in the last two decades."

On the pictures getting smaller:

"Much of what we see on the screens [phone] and television coverage is just for boring dramatic events, instead of formats that seem to have the aspects necessary to tell a story in a visual way. They’re not able to create exciting visual experiences, which I feel are an important part of the cinema: large images made for a big screen... A film like Lawrence of Arabia or Once Upon a Time in the West would not make sense on a small screen. This part of the achievement has been lost today, and we see how movies are mechanical and do not have well choreographed sequences. And images that are repeated endlessly because they are programmed by a computer."

And in closing, Valente notes that De Palma's cinema has a sentimental layer underneath the suspense, and quotes De Palma once more:

"I'm drawn to classical tragedy because I see it as a way to tell a more emotional story. I'm only interested in art that is emotional, that withstands the test of time."