I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

I'm really interested in the minutiae of different tones and what that explains - how people's backgrounds are reflected in minute details of how they interact. It's true that I'm hypersensitive to all that. Writing is acting in the sense that you're imagining and inhabiting another. In the book I was trying to get at the root of what true acting is.

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

You work with each individual actor as you perceive their needs to be. It's something that you've figured out in the weeks of pre-production.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!