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.

When you have children your own hypocrisy becomes more apparent because you're telling them how to behave, and you're not behaving like that yourself. So it obliges one to really go in and try to look at why there is a huge gulf between how one knows one wants to behave and how one actually does behave.

I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

Most films that I do, whether successful or not, just fade away. They have their moment in the sun, then they are gone. 'Trainspotting' did not, and especially with journalists. So whenever I launched a new film, I'd end up talking about 'Trainspotting.'

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

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.

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