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.

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.

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.

Music stops you from thinking.

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 carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

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.