There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

I absolutely refuse to accept the fact that any country in the world goes into a kind of film-making crisis. What happens is they lose confidence, they lose focus and the young film-makers of any particular generation can very easily get lost in that mix. It's happened in Italy, happened in France, happened in the U.K. during my lifetime.

I've always sensed what a script should sound like - even before the movie's been made

There's always a miasma of misinformation emerging from the higher education sector as to which are the "best" courses to take. My advice would always be to ignore the perceived wisdom and look for the most reliable evidence on the ground.

At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.

In the U.K., the history of regulation, certainly regulation of the media, is one in which, time and again, successive governments lacked the 'bottle' to enforce the powers that were available to them.

My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down.