As you get older and more successful, you don't get magnetically drawn to aristocracy, you get magnetically drawn to power, and it gets magnetically drawn to you. It's a symbiosis whether you like it or not.

When somebody say no, it's a red flag to a bull to me.

I'm part of an industry that everybody wants to be a part of. I do hang out with a lot of sort of powerful, interesting people like Bella Freud or Jay Joplin or Tracey Emin. I'm part of that group of people. Brit artists who are doing things. That's what I do. Some of them happen to be aristocrats.

As you get older and more successful, you don't get magnetically drawn to aristocracy, you get magnetically drawn to power, and it gets magnetically drawn to you. It's a symbiosis whether you like it or not.

I just absolutely go for it when somebody says, "No, you can't have this." That's why I spent my entire life sucking off straight men. "Okay, so you think you're straight, do you? We'll see about that."

Whether it's Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde, they're brilliant with genius bon mots. Of course, I find them extraordinary.

I still come from a very working-class family. My mother's still a cleaner. And my brother is the gas man. And my other brother runs a cab. I have become a stratified, different, exotic beast, even more so than I was when I was a young gay man. I just sort of built on that. Now that I've made several films, I don't even know how to placate them with money like so many people do with their families.