You have to trust your own instincts about what is appropriate and what is not appropriate and trust your own feelings about what you can and can't show for yourself, and it'll be different for everybody.

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.

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.

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.

When I got married, my mother was very surprised. She said: What on earth is going on? I thought you were gay?

I love changing. I hate it when people try to box me in to a relationship or in a work context. Any situation where I feel boxed in freaks me out. And I feel the need to reinvent myself or I'll get bored.

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.