But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.

Yes, obviously, there's this degree of wanting people to accept other people faiths and philosophies.

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

Politics is very interesting and always leads to conflict.

I went to Art College and during the summer I made a movie with my brother. I got hold of a little camera, wrote a script and dragged my brother, Tony, out of bed to help me (which he did not like), so that we could shoot a film every day for six weeks. It was made for £65 and it was called Boy On A Bicycle.

There is an access to... people can now afford very high quality technology, where you can have a very good reproduction of a large picture on a large screen at home. People go out less. There's all kinds of reasons. I don't know that it's going to stay that way but, I think also, we've got to start making better movies.

As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.