I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

In some ways Holy Smoke is about people's journey to the heart.

Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

When you first fall in love it's so thrilling, you can't wait to throw yourself away and make this new wonderful twosome.

I seem to have been able to make a career out of doing what I feel like doing, so why not keep doing it? What's corrupting is wanting to be more important. You want to be more arty - you get your identity from that. Or you get your identity out of making more money.

For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put the make-up on.