Doctor Who is pretty dark, I think. Generally its dark; its always been dark.

It's part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than it being just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.

I've had pretty much the same crew for all the films that I've made, and I've managed to have really nice, calm, funny people. That is a big part of it, a family feeling of warmth and finding something interesting and making a platform for them to perform. It's a very difficult job, acting, in that it's totally counterintuitive to how we are brought up.

Film is more of a dream when you're younger. I found it almost impossible to see how you would get into the industry having no connections, nobody in the family being anywhere near it and never meeting anybody that had been on a set.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

You can muscle your way to the top as long as you're part of the production, which I am. I'm knitted into the money, so it's very hard to extricate me from the decision-making dynamic.

Society is about masks and hiding and pretending to be something that you're not and not opening up, and in acting, you do all of those things, but it also shows the performers in a very raw state. They have to literally upset themselves to get to that position sometimes. You don't need a load of people judging you or not being interested in what you're doing or being an ass on set because it ruins it.