I had always been wary of doing any autobiographical movies, truly feeling at home with fiction.

I'm not from a theatre background, I'm wary of rehearsals. But what I do like is hanging out together, on location.

There's such a deep, conservative feeling in 'The way Back.' You go, 'gosh, we've gotten narrow.' So at the moment I think there's a kind of tension, and it's gold rush fever.

In terms of how I work with actors, having worked so heavily on the script I have a very clear idea of the characters; they are reasonably well illustrated in the script. If you cast it right, to a great degree you can hand it over to the actor and I just make suggestions. I'm not the kind of director who needs or wants to get into too much finessing. Ideally, when you hit the set, you have this conversation, like, 'eh, what did you think?' 'I don't know, what did you think?' 'Why don't we just try it again, make a few physical changes.'

I'm not from a theatrical background where people do like to work it out on some stage space.

Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things.

I had always been wary of doing any autobiographical movies, truly feeling at home with fiction.