What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

I fell in love again (laughs).

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.

I don't belong to any clubs, and I dislike club mentality of any kind, even feminism - although I do relate to the purpose and point of feminism. More in the work of older feminists, really, like Germaine Greer.

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.