If you approach India in the right way, you have so much to learn there about people, and there's so many people. It's such an extraordinary setup, and it's so bewildering how it manages to get through somehow, you can only wonder at it.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

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.

When you're in zero gravity everything moves at the same speed and nothing stops it. If you throw something it travels forever but it still travels at the speed you threw it at. To make it plausible, movies have chosen to show it in slow motion.

Once, a French journalist told me that all my films are the same. I said, 'Excuse me? I work hard to make them different.' What she meant was that in my films there is a character that faces insurmountable odds, and they overcome them. But I thought that might be true, but you need certain factors for drama, and you need to overcome them.

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.