Very occasionally I hire an actor and get it wrong. The actor just doesn't trust the process or me as fully as I thought they would. In this case, you can be quite sure that if an actor is untrusting, it's got nothing to do with me or the process.

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.

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

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

The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.

I did sit in cinemas as a kid looking at English and American movies thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if the characters were like real people?" And the worst thing is films are constantly advertising themselves, drawing attention to their style of things. But actually I make films that I think are extremely sophisticated and cinematic. But you don't want the audience thinking about the bloody film. You want them to think about what's going on, and believe in it. Be flies on the wall, you know?

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.