I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

A camera is a camera, a shot is a shot, how you tell the story is the main thing.

A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended.

My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.

I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.

You never quite know what you're going to come back to and figure out how to make it work. You never quite know where that desire to finish something, or return to something in a fresh way, is going to come from. Every time I finished a film and went back and looked at it, I had changed as a person.

It's very important that a film that intends to play tricks on the audience... has to play fair with the audience. For me, any time you're going to have a reveal in the film, it's essential that it have been shown to the audience as much as possible. What that means is that some people are going to figure it out very early on. Other people not til the end. Everybody watches the film differently.