I think Ed Harris is a conscious screen actor, so I think it was strong, it was like he put everything together somehow in 'The Way Back'. He likes, I don't want to say the method approach, because that's not really necessarily his way of working, but it was easy to do because of the location. He'd go off by himself, and they would make things.

When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'

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

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.'

Studios are attracted by making money, and they're also trying to simplify things, going with the genre thing. The gambling instincts of a few years ago where you might make some thousands or a few hundred, it's nothing now.

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.