It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.

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

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.

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.

The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.

I mean, artistic processes are all about making choices all the time, and the very act of making a choice is the distilling down and the getting to the core of what it is that you care about and what you want to say, really.

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