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

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

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

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

I've walked out of films. But for every film I've ever walked out of, I've probably walked out of 500 plays.

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

I grew up looking at... going to the movies a lot, as much as they'd let you. I grew up in Manchester in the north of England in the '40s and '50s. I saw a lot of movies. They were all Hollywood and British movies. I didn't see a film that wasn't in English until I was 17 when I went to London to be a student.