A lot of the reasons that I'm resistant to making films in the U.S. have nothing to do with not doing a film in Hollywood, but rather to do with what I'm committed to working on in the U.K. I feel very committed to the British film industry and infrastructure.

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.

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

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

I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.

I make films because I am endlessly fascinated by people. I'm fascinated immediately to know about the lives that are going on around me. That is what drives me. And that is because everybody matters, everybody is there to be cared about, everybody is interesting and everybody is the potential central character in a story. Judging people is not acceptable.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.