As the director, you have to hold in your head the widest possible vision. Not just the idea and the story, but the conceptual content. But at the same time, you have to consider the tiniest, tiniest detail.

You can't really divorce women's struggles in the world from women's in the cinema. As long as there's hierarchy it means that women are somehow secondary or second class or less than. That's going to be reflected in movies because films are the most powerful medium to reflect back society's view of itself

Between the postwar fifties - domesticity, people happy to be alive after the Second World War, wanting to build a home, make a family, make a nest. Women were pushed back into the home after having been active in the Second World War. It was a big Doris Day moment for women, which didn't suit all women.

I think that the word feminism doesn't imply enough in terms of solidarity with other liberation struggles. I am firmly committed to the notion that no one group can be freed until all groups are freed.

The language of cinema as it has evolved has also excluded vast swathes of human experience. The forms we find in the process of making a film can start to redress this balance and venture into uncharted territory. This is not just about unsung identities but about the subtleties and nuances of contemplation, the drifting spaces in which the worlds of the very small and the very large collide. Camerawork is a part of that.

As the director, you have to hold in your head the widest possible vision. Not just the idea and the story, but the conceptual content. But at the same time, you have to consider the tiniest, tiniest detail.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.