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.

There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience.

I like the idea of doing something outside my comfort zone.

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 don't ever want to go backwards, I quite like it. I like the freedom and I like the - What I set out to do was to make a big action-adventure movie that ticks all the boxes in terms of audience expectations and spectacle, and yet also make a very personal film and it feels like I've gotten away with that, I've managed that.

So much of today's film culture, in England and America, is based on lies, really. The industry is very ambitious, and success has become such an opium, people start from the wrong place they forget sometimes that the core of what we do is storytelling. It serves a need, a purpose for the individual and society to pull us together in shared experience and help us realize we're not alone in that experience.

I see the job of directing as being one of creating the right atmosphere, creating an environment where people can realize their full potential.