I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

There's a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I'd have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.