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 milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.

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

As much as there are intellectual choices to be made and all the rest of it, a great actor has the ability really, to disappear and lose themself in a kind of mystical fashion. My appreciation and fascination with true acting is really all over the book, definitely.

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

There is a magic thing called 'tone' in a film, that the director must master and maintain.