I can't really see how anybody could be particularly optimistic about the future in general because we are destroying the planet.

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

There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience. When you're meeting somebody for the first time, all you have to go on are your preconceptions and your stereotypes and whatever else, but gradually as you get to know them, they change. They become more three-dimensional, and you start to see them in layers.

I think Michael Caine is a perfectly good actor but it's obvious he's not going to be in one of my films.

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

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.