Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

I mean I grew up in Ireland, so one would have to be consciously blinkered not to have reflected on the issue of political violence because that was the story since I was 19 years old or 20.

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.

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.

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

Ireland is becoming like everywhere else, but that's the one I grew up in: the one that's hugely illogical. Rather wonderful, in a way. I never found this oppression of religion and that, but I did enjoy growing up in a culture that didn't need to be rational all of the time.

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.