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.

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

I've never been to Hollywood. I can count the number of times I've been to Los Angeles on my hands. I've never made a movie there and I've never been there for working reasons. The only reason to go there is for silly awards shows.

There are a few writers that one has a relationship with that means, basically, you do whatever they say. One is Caryl Churchill, and the other is David Hare.

I'm not really a director for hire. You read these scripts and go, 'This is a really great script, but Paul Greengrass would make this so much better than me.' I usually say, 'I know who would be good for this. It's not me.

If I wanted to work financially, I would have made a series of different choices. I do get offered lots of movies which you could make a lot of money out of. And I always say, 'Why would I do that, when someone else could do it much better than me? Why would I want to do an action picture? Why?

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.