I think that people are still trying to understand each other and overcome prejudices. And people are still, most important, loving each other. And that is today as it was yesterday and will be for another 200 years.

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.

I think people are at their most creative when they're relaxed. I don't believe that tension is good for creativity. Everyone is relaxed and therefore can feel able to express their own individual creativity and lots of ideas come in. It's a joy like that.

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 find it ironic that happy endings now are called fairytale endings because there's nothing happy about most fairytale endings.

My first cut that I showed the studio was probably 2hrs 20min.

Most of my choices come about through some kind of intuition or instinct, and if I need to, I'll post-rationalize them, intellectually, afterwards. But generally, they come about just by feeling.