I've been wanting for some time to find a way of stylizing cinema and trying to get closer to the emotional story I was telling and get rid of all the bumph that goes with it and allow the audience a more participatory experience. It was an attempt to do all of those things and to express the idea that all these people were just performing roles in their lives.

Modern, not bottom-dwelling literature like a carp.

Generally, I've never known quite how to fit in in civilian life, but on set, making a film, I know exactly where to go, how to behave and how I fit.

I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.

I think maybe I might tackle something that doesn't reach down to a very, very young audience, like more of a kind of teenager and upwards.

Fairy tales to me are never happy, sweet stories. They're moral stories about overcoming the dark side and the bad.

I'm quite spontaneous in my decisions often. Your career is kind of what happens whilst you're busy developing other screenplays, and so it came out of the blue.