All we try and do is make the best films we can. If you do that then hopefully the audiences will come, and they have. Everything else is gravy.

I don't think you can be a director without a kind of sense of competitiveness.

I think it's great to see how they've grown up, not just as actors but as people. They're still very much the same kids that I met many years ago. They've grown up and they are funny and wicked and naughty and bright, and I think as actors their work is just getting better and better. They've blossomed.

I got a few things, because I think the props are so beautiful as much as anything else. The detail of the work is something that one has no idea of.

Because actually it's really hard to get things made. It takes years. To fight the fights you inevitably have to fight, even when you've produced Harry Potter, you'd better have the commitment and the passion to knock down walls, not take no for an answer.

We tell the stories that we want to tell.

The truth is, it's very hard looking back... we look at holocaust now with such knowledge and such a sense of the horror of what it was, that it's hard to believe even now that in 1930s and 1940s, before something like this had happened, that it could be impossible to imagine the extent of this horror.