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

The great fun of doing new plays is that people have no idea what's going to happen next. That goes quite soon, as people start talking about it, and the only way you can keep hold of that is genuinely to keep changing it.

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.

As soon as I know how to do something, I usually get bored with it.

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.

I have never been motivated by money in my life. You can't make choices based on what the financial return might be.

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?