It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing.

Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.

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.

I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.

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

For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.

I don't know why anybody would come to Ireland chasing a dream or even employment - that's an extraordinary thing for a place where traditionally one was unemployed. For 10 years, people were coming from all over the world looking for employment here, kind of an extraordinary phenomenon. That's stopped now.