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

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.

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 look forward to having the time and the opportunity to take on new challenges, but I'm also aware that I've loved every minute of the 'Potter 'experience: to make films for an enthusiastic audience and work with great material.

Making the films is never easy, but actually that aspect of trying to make a better film or to keep the standard high is something that comes organically.