Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.

We're trying to learn from [Olympic] Beijing, which could be very intimidating. We've learned to expect it's power, it majesty and that it completes a cycle of certain types of shows... I don't think any nation could do anything on that scale. We haven't got that money, and I don't think anybody would have the appetite for that kind of expenditure and that kind of control, so we're going to try and do something a bit more intimate and try and start again... start a new cycle for these kind of ceremonies.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

I haven't got anything against films that are about the minutia of relationships or customs, but I love extremes. I love taking a bunch of characters and it usually is a bunch of characters, and you throw something at them that's usually extreme, like a bag of money, or you send them out to explode a nuclear device on the surface of the sun. And those extremes are wonderful for drama.

I have a philosophy, a belief, which I can see in many, many other directors that your early work is your best work, because you don't know what you're doing.

The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you.