America is a huge country, of course. It's complicated. There's good, and there's not so good, and that's the same wherever you live.

Interestingly, I never thought Id do an adaptation. Ive also been quite against them. I think trying to translate one medium to another is wrong. I never really felt that books fitted into film. Generally people are disappointed, arent they?

I can't remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.

I hear filmmakers saying, 'I wanted to make to make a film about this issue, or this theme,' but I never start like that.

I don't want to think too much about me.

I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's. I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or “grim” or “gritty,” I just think, “Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.” My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know.