Of course, when you're doing something that's unexpected, people are going to have a very specific point of view about it, but I think it's all good to have a healthy debate about who Hitchcock was and what that means to people. He means a lot of different things to a lot of different people because the films are so great. If the movies were not great, no one would be bothering to show any interest.

I love the idea of creative collaboration. I love the idea of exploring marriages, particularly ones that are in process for a long time.

I really relate to outsider characters. Especially the eccentric, lunatic weirdos like Alfred Hitchcock, Viktor Navorski in The Terminal, or the Anvil guys. Everything I've done is about these quite eccentric, exotic outsiders who you might see in a certain light at first, but once you scratch the surface a little, you realize that they're not that different from you. I think there's an element of that which unites.

The good thing about the Anvil school of filmmaking was that it was fly by the seat of your pants. There was no safety net.

When you take on Hitchcock you know it's gonna provoke some sort of controversy, because there were so many people talking about the book [Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho] and wanting it to be the film about the making of this movie [Psycho]. But that's been done. That's been done in the book, and Stephen Rebello himself was like, "I want a movie which is an entertainment for the audience." So we made the conscious decision.

I think Alma Reville was the only one Alfred Hitchcock trusted. When it came to issues of taste or what the audience wanted, down to editing, script and casting, he would turn to her first. She was his partner.

Being English definitely gave me some insight into these eccentric Brits puttering around Hollywood.