I'm a theatre person, that's who I am. I'm happy to make sojourns into the world of movies but I'm basically a theatre director that potters off and does a couple of movies.

You go through a process of refinement and getting rid of the excesses of your early youth in terms of your excitement about what theatre can do.

Well, there are three different processes of making a film, of course. They're sort of re-written three times. You write it to start with, and then you shoot it and you re-write it while shooting and you sort of re-write it as you edit.

I would love to do something for TV... I wanna do 'Kavalier & Clay' on HBO as an eight-parter. It'll be so much better as a series, honestly.

At school, I decided I wanted to be a director and then I went out and spent the rest of my adult life trying to be a director. It was really clear to me. So in that sense I was very lucky.

With journalism, films always have to be to do with some personal statement of your own. As a general rule, I resist that. In the States, a question that kept coming up was this: how can you, as a man, talk about three women?

England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.