If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

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.

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.

Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

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.

As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.