In some ways, many of the skills you have as a producer on independent films also apply to making big tentpole films: You surround yourself with a brilliant director, great script and talented people in every department who are smarter than you.

The films you're making have to be faithful to the material.

But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.

I like stories that begin with characters. I like to be engaged and moved by the characters in the story. I want to be moved. I want to leave the cinema and think about what I've seen. My sensibility is quite eclectic and it doesn't matter if they are small or large films, I just want to make good films.

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

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.

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.