We tell the stories that we want to tell.

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 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.

A lot of things change and a lot of things stay the same, they mostly stay the same.

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.

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.

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.