There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently.

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.

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.

Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.

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.

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!

The most important thing about Olympics, of course, is the games and not the opening ceremony. It's weird the way it gets inverted sometimes.