Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable.

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 love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

If I was American, I think I'd live in New York, because I like that East Coast mentality. There's nothing wrong with Hollywood. If you want to be a big time filmmaker, you should go to Hollywood.

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.

The great thing about space films generally, with the exception of Apollo 13, is that big stars tend not to work in space and I think that's because space is an equaliser. It makes everyone the same really and suits an ensemble cast and actors who are prepared to work with each other.

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.