I've always believed that if you want to really try and make a great film, not a good film, but a great film, you have to take a lot of risks.

What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I'm watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I'm discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story.

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. 'Alien,' 'Blade Runner' just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

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.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.