To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.

I don't want to direct. I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.

You can only do the best you can in the minute that you're doing it.

There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.