It's hard to smoke a pipe, and it's actually kind of brutal. It burns your mouth and your throat, and to keep it lit.

A lot of my friends are gangsters. Not like gangsters - well, yeah, all sorts of levels of criminality - but not the types that are preying on innocent people. I have no interest in the type of criminality that has no respect for collateral damage.

I was a slightly melancholy child and I think films were a way of escaping for me.

I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.

It's hard to smoke a pipe, and it's actually kind of brutal. It burns your mouth and your throat, and to keep it lit.

My philosophy about the whole thing is that awards are like gifts: it's lovely to receive them, and it is very bad form to covet them.

So I try not to do press and if you can keep the balance of keeping a certain degree of anonymity and do interesting work then you can hope for a degree of career longevity