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.

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!

As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.

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.

I always listen to music, my passion and vice is music, I will be denied access to heaven because of the number of CDs I own, and I have gluttony for all types and colours of music.

I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly.

[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.