Sixty-five days principle photography, five-day weeks, which is the only way I'll work. With my cinematographer Russell Boyd, we take as much time as possible before pre-production, looking at stills. The next most important thing: he will come to me and talk about lenses. And I'll see his plan, which is generally great, and I might talk about how the light will be, handheld or not? I talk very freely, and try not to talk specifically, just talk around it, because it can unlock all sorts of things.

With war and famine and flood and special effects films, when you do somebody under duress, you have to be really be inventive and the risk of keeping it very simple is you might loose some of the audience because it's not overt, it's hidden, not coming at you. Then you might cut through to some of this numbness and reach something profound and tragic.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

Casting is always critical but in this case, 'The Way Back', I was looking internationally to a degree for an interesting mix of gentlemen, Irish, Polish, Russian and American. Not many people had the qualifications, people who would play the game, particular to this industry. So I had to research amongst the cast. They had to be very very prepared as we had to start shooting as soon as we could, there wasn't any time to talk, and there would only be three or four takes.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.