People have been very resistant to giving me more than the standard amount of money. So I keep making films on a similar scale. Which is fine, but also frustrating.

I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.

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

There is a great tradition of independent filmmaking in the U.S. that I absolutely respect. There's some wonderful stuff that comes out in this country against all the odds.

I take no notice of the trends. It has never concerned me at all. My job is to deal with what I want to deal with and reach an audience by doing so.

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

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.