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

Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have [in aliens]. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.

You step forward and make it real for a start. You choose a sensible moment in history. Funnily enough, England was bankrupt and the moment is the death of Richard The Lionheart... Richard takes an arrow in the neck collecting a small debt from a small castle on his way home from the Crusades because he's penniless.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

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.