My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.

I never retreat from films, as it were, I simply indulge in other interests, that's all.

Ireland was a place for the renewal of hope and I still see it like that.

I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way on the details that are not at all at the centre of the work.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.