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.

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.

Sometimes my scripts get so dissolved, and they're so different from when I wrote them originally, that I find it hard to find what I wrote in it.

I genuinely try to make movies I'd want to go and see, movies that are a bit more challenging.

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.

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.

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.