That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.

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's nothing really original. Alien was a B-movie. Five directors passed on it before me. Because I was into Heavy Metal, I read it, and thought, "Wow, I want to do this." I was on a plane to Hollywood in 22 hours. It was a B-movie and was elevated to an A-plus movie by sheer good taste.

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.

I spend a lot of my time just developing material; or the company does. That material can come from a book, can come from a newspaper, can come from a discussion and sometimes it can come from a script that got passed over and is floating around.

Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.

You've got to be able to know someone really well to be able to have a row and then also walk away from it and not have it matter, especially in this business. That doesn't mean to say we have many rows but I think the nearest thing to a row would be just flatly disagreeing with something .