If you take a loud pride in anything, people will rightly shoot you down.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

Clearly, you can think back and see that a character has had enormous odds stacked against him and has to overcome them. It's usually a guy, I'm afraid. But then you're setting up a new movie you have amnesia about these meetings, when you've discussed it more analytically.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you're time is over. They find you out and send you packing.

One of the traditions of film acting is a sort of mumbled realism. Be minimal, and do less. 'Even less than that.'

There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two.