The great thing with film is that it doesn't have an ego. It's just a film. Everybody that makes them has an ego, and the problem with awards and stuff like that is that it always affects the egos, and everyone gets stained by it in some way. And that can be fine and very innocent, but it can be horrible as well.

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 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.

You can do anything you like - really - but this Sci-Fi is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

There are three huge, titanic, space movies which if you ever make a film [about space] you cannot avoid. You may want to avoid them but you cannot. I've never known a genre like it where you are dictated to by these films, 2001, Alien, and Tarkovsky's Solaris.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

What you do is take the power [popularity] gives you - which is very temporary and minor but significant - and use it. The danger is that you use it on a vanity project that no one wants to watch.