It's not so much that I want to direct but that I have to. When I write something it terrifies me that if I give it to someone else and it doesn't turn out as it could have done, I'd feel as if I'd orphaned my baby.

In terms of popular cinema, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is as near perfection as I can think of.

The acting I got into by doing what we call pantomime, when I was sixteen. And, there were loads of very pretty girls in the show. I realized; I found out very early on, that the lead comic gets the girl. So, that was cool. When I went to university, I studied Economic Social History. And drama. That kind of got me into it. My main passion was to make films. It was never to be an actor. At that time, there weren't many opportunities for a working class Scottish actor. It was kind of an English thing. And it required a certain mannered cerebral acting style that I couldn't relate to.

Just in relation to women, it's not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church.

I hate it when something is set in 1967 and every piece of furniture was made in 1967. No! If it's set in 1967, people have furniture given to them by their grandmother, which she bought in 1932!

I know virtually no one of my age who can remember a hug, or a smile from their father, or a 'Let's go play football.'

There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there's fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.