The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

I have a desire to tell stories. And I'm never quite satisfied.

We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can't burn him.

It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.

I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.

We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before... Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like fast food and then forgotten – we need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.

The storyboard for me is the way to visualise the entire movie in advance.