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.

Writers and filmmakers have this age-old relationship to the material.

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 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.

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 I found out making this last movie ["Method"], if you ever do things in an unusual, different way, you got to fight because there's no way people will let you.