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 had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.

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

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.

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.

There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

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