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.

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

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

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

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

Writing is a particular kind of frustration, which is why when I was making the structure for the novel I visualized it for myself with a color-coded board so I could see it.

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