I would rather be handsome for an hour than pretty for a week.

Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.

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.

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.

We also knew [ me and Ewan McGregor] that, on a practical level, if there was going to be that much sex in the film [Young Adam] - which there clearly had to be because sex is the meat and potatoes of the thing - it had to be varied for the audience, because it's important to keep the audience living in it.

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.