I think women assess time passage much better than men - because of their biological clocks - and they are much more realistic about measuring out time, whereas men tend to hang onto things. Women acknowledge the biology of their time, and dance through the beat of that drum...whereas men just drum.

Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.

There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.

I always wanted to make this film or another film. I thought the worst thing you could do was to react to Slumdog's success in some way. I thought it would be really foolish.

Always changing genres, making very different films is a good idea. It's a way of making yourself feel vulnerable again, getting back to that innocence. As is working within a circumspect budget.