People can criticise me all day long. It just washes off me. You might as well be talking to a wall.

I think one thing my mother always instilled in me was a sense of individuality. Being an only child, I never thought I had to rely on anyone. I was never afraid to be alone and I was never afraid to be my own person. So when all my friends were like, "Let's smoke weed," I was like, "I'm not doing it." It wasn't because I was trying to be a rebel or because I didn't like it or I was anti-drugs. I just didn't do it because I didn't want to do it, and if I didn't want to do it, I wasn't doing it. That was it.

If I'm given the opportunity of writing, directing and acting in the same film I would love to do it again. It's something I don't think that anyone else is doing in the country at this level... not many people are doing it in the world. I think if you check that out and find it's quite accurate, there's only a handful of people that actually are doing it.

The BFI recently did a study of the British films that have the most people of color in them in the last 10 years, and in the top 10, three of the films were my films. I've always been a glass-is-half-full person. I've always gone, "If people aren't going to do it, I'm going to do it".

I allowed the actors to have freedom and sometimes change words if they needed to or thought that another word was more current.

I just started to write because I was fed up of not seeing the stories that I wanted, so I was like “Stop moaning and write something.”

I was offered and accepted a part in 'A Few Best Men,' and then the Australian actor's union argued that there were too many British actors. And the director decided to lose me.