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

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

I always thought the editor should cut the film and so I'll come in and look at the movie. Just because that's the only way I can really see the ideas of the editor, it's really working together. Yes it's a hierarchy, yes I'm the boss, but I like to see and to think about the idea, and it's about us asking, 'do we have to say that?' and, 'how do we make it there?' So it's advising the editor, it's very give and take, it's very free, but in the end, it's wonderful once you get through the first couple of cuts.

Casting the right actor for the right part is some unspoken thing between the two of you to communicate.

What we love that 'The Way Back' is not subsidized, it's alive and kicking. And if I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it, I've had a great run. But I'm more concerned with the younger people coming up that want to make this kind of film.

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

Anybody I'd spoken to who'd been in Siberia said 'would you please put mosquitos in your film,' that's what everybody knows about, they're big and they're nasty.