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.

It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.

If you're brought up Catholic, you're convinced of magic at a very early age. You're convinced the world isn't entirely real, which is a kind of conviction that never leaves you, for some strange reason.

I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.

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.

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

I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.