All films are learning processes. I am still trying to work out how you make a movie. I didn't study at film school or any of those things. I didn't bother with film theory.

Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things.

I want brave people. Fearless ones. A good actor just goes out and leaps off the edge and develops wings on his way down, hopefully. That's the kind of people I really enjoy working with. Playing safe isn't much fun. I like danger. It's controlled danger, always, and that's why I hope I don't lure too many good actors down into the pits with me, because I hope they maintain their own unique talents.

They all sort of get mixed up in my head, to be quite honest. They're all dealing with similar things. It's about how you deal with reality, by ignoring it sometimes, reinventing it other times, and that's how you get through it.

The forces that run the world always try to keep things under control. The population might be having a wonderful time, buying iPods and going to nice restaurants, but I still feel they're all kind of under control.

If you really want your films to say something that you hope is unique, then patience and stamina, thick skin and a kind of stupidity, a mule-like stupidity, is what you really need.

The success of the Hollywood marketing machine is to limit what we see. Not just to limit what we can see, but also to limit our expectations - to limit what we want to see.