It's the best of the best. No film can hope to top it(Kubrick's 2001).

I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it`s 3% good, 97% stupid.

Digital is a different world because you are sitting at home and a hi tech piece of equipment today is within reach of most people, so they are watching a pretty hi tech version of whatever you've done.

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.

It goes back a long way. I wanted to make Tristan + Isolde as my second movie. My first movie was The Duellists. And I was standing in a very romantic part of France looking around me thinking, "My God, this would be perfect for Tristan," and to cut a long story short it never happened because I did Alien instead.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

It's everything and I always make decisions about the cast.