I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

You live your life and it ends quite quickly and all you can do with it is pass it on decently to someone else. Whether directly or indirectly, behave decently to other people.

If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

Basically, actors arrive in a bubble. They have a little sealed bubble around them and it's basically [comprised of] their agents, their last film, their next film, their press agent, and their per diems - all these things, they cocoon themselves with and you have to puncture that bubble on each of them to make them be in your film.

Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.