I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

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.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. It's always at the back of my mind - let's give up this silly business of film-making and concentrate on something more satisfying and worthwhile.

I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.