When I was thirteen, I had a nervous breakdown, and I was put into this grown-up mental hospital with all these 50-, 60-year-old men and women. This big, Victorian mental house. There were like five boys in there, all my age, looked after by this woman who was 22 or 23. And it was like "Empire of the Sun" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-type of arrangement where you've got this young boy overcoming and becoming heroic in the face of this awful place.

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 found my friends very amusing the first time because they are funny and amusing. They really are because they're people who've got everything. They're sort of like camp caricatures of what you expect an aristocrat should be: vicious, rude, caustic unpleasantries.

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.

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.

I did make some money, the first money that I ever made, doing this last one, and it's an extraordinary feeling just being given the freedom to do something.