Sometimes you can incubate a character and that can take me a month just sitting on it imagining it, doing everything from sketching it to taking long walks, but sometimes you can see the character immediately. A lot of it is instinctive.

I daydream about things I want to happen, but none of it is more complicated, most of the time, than just really hoping that the good parts and the well-written parts are the ones that turn up on my doorstep.

I try and avoid thinking of strategy and I tend to stick to my gun of doing things that I like and try to avoid things that I "should" be doing, and stay true to that.

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

You either are a good director or you're not.

You either hear the story and you're curious, and you're sort of sympathetic, or you think, "Ugh, how horrible." That's dehumanizing. How about we take that and turn Christine Chubbuck into a person and it's not about the final act, it's about her life. I felt that really strongly, and I felt a sort of deep sympathy with her. It's also why I do what I do. I want to try to make difficult people somehow relatable.

There are people all over the world who like to write fan letters in the voice of their pet: 'Hello, my name is Fifi and I'm a labrador and I think you're great. Paw paw!'