When people approach me about my films it is usually to tell me how much they hate them.

I prefer to take actors and put them in real settings and real locations and real situations rather than create artificial locations that serve the characters. It's just much easier when you are walking down the street with your actors to do that in a real street that's still open with people on it, rather than to close it off and bring in extras.

If you make a film set in London or in Pakistan or wherever, the thing that interests me is the relationships between individuals - individuals and society, individuals and their family, their girlfriend or boyfriend, it's all the same idea.

You can almost take the book and use it as a script.

I think it would be impossible if you had a name like mine not to get a little flack for it.

I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting.

When you're working with a script and you have three pages for that day, you have to shoot that. It can become sort of like a prison, because by the time you've shot what you need to shoot, you don't really have time to think or shoot anything else.