I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.

Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.

I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.