The most important thing is that you have to have the visual effects working for you, instead of you working for the visual effects.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.