Initially with The Butcher Boy, there was this kid growing up in this strange, weird environment that I remember from when I was a kid. And Patrick's vision was so complete there.

When you've written a movie, you then get together with a whole lot of people and make it. In many ways, I think it is far nicer to be with people rather than being completely solitary.

The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need.

The great thing about fairy tales and myths is that they go beyond character. They're not about character. They're about more basic things. They're about basic fears or longings or desires or fantasies, and stuff like that.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

The whole Ireland was taken over by greed and materialism. It was extraordinary. The price of every house had skyrocketed. If you were a small farmer and you had two fields outside, if you built 17 bungalows on them all, you become a millionaire, that kind of thing. It was extraordinary to see how rapidly that kind of ethic takes over a whole culture, but that's what's happened to us since the year 1998, about. It's completely extraordinary how little regard the culture had for the landscape. The country is now full of these half-built industrial parks and hotels.

Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?