Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.

Hollywood always chooses young and beautiful men and throws them into enormous, highly expensive toy-like movies, and I think sometimes it's hard for the maturity of the craft to emerge in that kind of glare.

If movies have to satisfy every possible quadrant before they're even made, they're dull. You only get great things when people overreach themselves.

Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.

The truth is that seals look more like dogs. And I'm surrounded by seals because I live by the sea. They're odd bloody creatures. Not fish, they don't have gills, they should have legs, but they don't. They're the weirdest things, you know?

The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.