To force yourself out of the comfort zone, the main ingredient is trying to work in a world where you haven't been before, that you don't know the rules of. And that involves a lot of research, so you begin to see where the other people have been, but you are starting from as vulnerable and as low a point as possible.

You can't tell someone they are wrong about their own life.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

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.

I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

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.

I find my own pain and others' difficult to tolerate, so I always want to try to shift things so they'll be better. But in doing that, if I am coming from a place of ego, I often cause harm. So it's a struggle for me to set my ego outside and find a softer and more compassionate way of approaching things.