The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation.

As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.

At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.

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

When I left university I was sure that I was going to be a painter. Then I had a crisis, a revelation. I saw Dolce Vita and my mind was blown by it, by the synthesis. I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker and started making films. I was writing screenplays and couldn't get money because my work was so uncommercial. I got married and started writing fiction. What was wonderful is that it gave me my freedom because no-one can tell me I can't work. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

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.