My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.

To create the reality of space with this sense of suspension: nothing's happening, it's endless; we're traveling at 28,000 kilometers an hour but nothing's happening. Nothing! And you have to do that! There are all these rules you have to follow, I've never known anything like it.

I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.

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 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.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

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.