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 make a movie in the UK you've got to embrace the weather with open arms... We got some of the most amazing weather as well. It's maybe why some of these places, like the Lake District, don't get filmed in so much. If you were trying to make it look like some kind of chocolate box image of England you'd be there all year waiting for the sun to come out.

Lots of crime films are about work. Free Fire could have been about a company of plumbers doing pipe-fixing and stuff. But the plumbing film is not so exciting.

I think a big part of my job is to make an atmosphere on set and have an attitude that it's about experimentation, and you can't do anything wrong. It's not about judgment, it's not about me kicking over a chair and storming onto set and acting stuff out and telling people to copy what I do. That is a style of directing some people have, but I don't understand it.

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.

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 think CGI is interesting but it's too expensive and limiting in terms of what you can do shot-by-shot.