I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.

We''re all misfits here,” he says, almost proudly. “That's why I started this squat, after all. For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else. Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird. That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend. From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.

I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.

Filmmaking can be a fine art.

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.

There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.

But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.