Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

But interestingly Star City's technology is all 1970s - still. In fact, it's alarming because you think, "You're not going to send someone up into space in something that old, are you?" But it works and it always has worked and it doesn't fail and it's incredibly reliable.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

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'm always after putting people in extreme circumstances. I'm always after not knowing what I'm doing in those extreme circumstances.

We want to see drama told in a cathartic way, with power, with emotion where you empathize and then you're frightened. All those feelings charge up in you and you feel for the story.

If you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it.