I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in Cinderella. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly.

I think that a lot of exciting elements are finding a place where a film is happily, truly about something.

I looked at the 1950 animated film [Cinderella], I read a couple of editions of the fairy tale that I have in my house and all of it seemed to say that there was room for a version that delivered, in this story, which seems to invite a feeling in people and I think that is some version of a classical world.

So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.

Actually I think 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' could sit very very perfectly in the middle of a Disney world I think.

It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.

I wanted to have a place and a space, and a building, in which to create a season of work I am here because the idea of a theatrical home is very appealing to me