The technique of the book and the technique carried by the figure of Scheherazade is one of opening the Sultan's mind. He's emblematic of the ignorant person: the ignorant, lock-in, raging man who wants to kill all he doesn't understand. The model of the book is the extraordinary, very-large, Mirror of Princes.

I consider it as a foreshadowing of modernity in many different respects, and the consistency of character is interesting to the emerging modern psychology. The emphasis on dream knowledge relates quite deeply to psychoanalysis, although I suppose psychoanalysis wouldn't like to say that... Freud was always saying he was a scientist.

Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It's a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways, that's just an example of one of the most wicked women in the Nights.

An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story...how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel.

It seemed to me to be a parable of the exchange of goods, rather Marxist in some ways, in the new world of global forces. What the forgers do is write the brand name to try and change it, and it works! Loads of people buy fake Prada handbags, or Chanel sunglasses; they've been changed. They have been truly, really changed.

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.