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.

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

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

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.

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.