If you've been to Moscow, it's a really exciting and great city, but it still feels like you should be a little careful about which way you're going to step.

I don’t feel in a kind of race or competition with him or anybody else, because that kind of reactive thing isn’t good, or isn’t useful for natural creative instincts

Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.

Even when a film is finished, when I direct a film, sometimes it's a dark profession, but it requires a peculiar form of courage that I admire.

With people in corsets you need, an hour and a half in you have to give somebody something, you have to have those trays with a little bit of fruit going around or something because you get that blood sugar [dropping] thing, so it's curious because that's in your mind at the same time as you're about to say, 'I think it's about the humanity and the depth of feeling and we need to feel [Cinderella] soul expand and by the way, more cheese for the people in the back.'

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.

Helena Bonham-Carter and I sat down to talk about [Cinderella movie] and she said, 'I really want to do it but only one thing I insist on and that's wings.' She had to have wings and [costume designer] Sandy Powell didn't want wings to begin with but had to be talked around, but that was fun.