Good storytelling for me is not so much technical expertise, which I know is applauded often; it's actually freshness of approach. It does mean you sometimes stumble and fall and make a horrible mess of things in seeking that freshness, but you should always keep trying to do that.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

Movies are about time. You can take that momentum and manipulate time as well, or you can deliberately slow it down, stop it, and start it again. There is no other art form that does that type of manipulation in that way.

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

I like to hide behind my intellect. But the truth is, unless all of us start getting honest about what the reality is, things aren't going to change. If we all keep pretending that we know stuff and if everyone else would do what we knew and everything would be a better place, then nothing is going to change.

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

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