For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther.

I find his films about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there's a gas bill tied to it.

The Maigret stories are all very different in terms of the content and the way that the stories are told. They're not what I would call formulaic.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.