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.

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

The smallest detail can contribute to the whole, I think particularly with emotion, you want it to be as authentic as it can, whether its a artifact or a theatrical event. But the whole is the sum of so many images.

So much of the work is intuitive. The resistance you detect is just that, a kind of evasion, a sense that too much analysis will inhibit creativity.

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.

I love a chance to shoot real locations, because in films in the earlier days before people traveled as much, it was exotic to see a film set in Switzerland, and that area has been taken over by CGI, mostly, and fantasy landscapes. It's unusual to see this much landscape, people say it's old fashioned. So what you're referring to is there was that period in the '50s and '60s when there were epics and you saw landscape.