Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.

I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.

I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways.

Some deeply untrusting actors - the kind that need to know exactly what's what and are completely insecure - might be quite good within the parameters of a certain sort of acting.