Now, anybody can make a movie, and I don't see that many great movies, because I think there's only a limited amount of talent out there.

Fantasy isn't just a jolly escape: It's an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It's where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying. You move into a world of conflicting extremes.

I was an incredible Anglophile. I found people who shared the same sense of humor and attitude toward the world.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

I do think so much of what I do is reactive to the way the world sees itself, or the way the world is being portrayed. I wanted to offer an alternative to that. Whether it is accepted or not is beside the point, but it's an alternative.

There's something about living in the country that I think makes you inventive, because nature is full of miracles and wonder and surprises, and if you don't have much money, you have to make things if you want things.