I've done a number of things that get categories closed off in a way, so when I read 'The Long Walk' by Slavomir Rawicz and decided to do film, 'I thought, you know, this is going to be wonderful,' two and a half years, three years, whatever it was.

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

I love stories and I don't like to repeat myself. And I look for new stuff, and as they say it gets harder.

In 'The Way Back' survivors were all ordinary people, and that's the whole point, that's who I felt these people should be, and they shouldn't be that hero that stands out.

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 loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries.

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.