Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor share a tense moment in Cassandra's Dream Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

I saw Cassandra's Dream recently and I found Colin Farrell's character interesting, because he's unlike many of the characters in your murder dramas. In Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors, it was all about how a rational materialist or an atheist deals with a moral crisis, but this character is God-fearing, clearly.
Well, I wanted to delineate three characters. I wanted one person who had no problem compromising himself, or very little problem compromising himself, really, another who was reluctant to do it but went ahead with it but couldn't handle it because in the end he just had too much conscience. Something just struck him as wrong and he couldn't take it. He couldn't be sure that there was not some kind of moral order to the universe and thought that he had transgressed it in some way and it had to be set right. And then a brother who was able to handle a moral compromise and an uncle who is completely a-moral and can have these guys take care of his problem and at the end just march off without any problem, having achieved everything that he wanted, having eliminated the guy who was giving him a hard time and he'd had the two nephews do the job for him. So I wanted to give a contrast between those three.

Do you ever look at a dark drama like this one while you're making it and decide it needs some humor to keep it from being oppressively bleak?
Once in a while. There are a few laughs in this picture. There are a few things that are funny, just like in Match Point when Jonathan Rhys Meyers is trying to put the rifle together just before he kills the woman. The parts kept dropping and he couldn't assemble it when the time came and then finally he did. Same thing here — they want to kill the guy but there's constantly an excuse. Colin comes up with an excuse — "Let him talk to his mother first and then we'll kill him." There were things that were lighter, that were for slight relief from the relentless tragedy that was unfolding. Meeting the guy at a party and coming face to face with him, you know, had a lighter quality. I'm not gonna do jokes in the thing, but there are moments that are lighter, ironical, amusing, in the hopes of giving it some slight pace that way.

I'm sure you have as much control over your films now as you ever did, but I'm wondering if you're coming under more pressure these days to cater to things like DVD features.
No, I'm not under any pressure whatsoever. Nobody ever even suggests it. I make the film and then I put it out and they put it on DVD. Invariably they ask me "Do you have any outtakes? Do you have anything we can throw on this thing?" But I almost never do. And I'm not the kind of person who wants to comment on my films as you're watching them. So I've had very sparse DVDs.