When I'm in northern Italy, I walk about feeling slightly less of a freak.

For me, sex is a refraction of the thing about identity. In the sexual contact, which is usually - but not exclusively - between two people, you do retain separate people.

A large part of my filmmaking self has to do with my love of being in the cinema audience, and my relationships to what I want to see on the screen, what I have seen on the screen and what I don't want to see on the screen again.

I'm interested in that whole question of where we wear our identity and how can we see it.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

If we don't accept loneliness, then capitalism wins hands down. Because capitalism is all about trying to convince people that you can distract yourself, that you can make it better. And it ain't true.

We must hang on to the idea that we can actually change things. That's the sort of environment that Joe finds himself in, in Young Adam.