There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

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

The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.

Cinema has reached a dead end.