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 don't know what the character is going to be. We sit down and we create a character, and all of the characters in all of my films are made like that.

One of the reasons the whole Hollywood way of making films wouldn't work for me is because the way I operate would be anathema to anyone who wants to hold a job down in Beverly Hills.

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

My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

Films are made all over the world all the time and only a thin slice of that product is Hollywood.

But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?