The story, it's really important to The Ancient One that Doctor Strange does cut it because The Ancient One needs a successor, or certainly needs - you could say - a son. So The Ancient One is really invested in Doctor Strange, it's a very kind of primal relationship.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

Archetypes are always [in my film-making]. It's sometimes interesting to just flip them a little bit and see the underside.

We [ with Ewan McGregor] decided exactly what we would do at every moment, what the texture would be.

It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.

The great news is that that sort of group of people and that sort of sensibility is beginning to become more active again. And I think partly it just has to do with the time. It has to do with the culture of resistance. The necessity is for us to pull together and to speak up and to make work and be visible.

[My work] just develops and develops, and I'm very nicely served by the universe: just as I'm ready to take the conversation further with myself, some other individual pops up, like David McKenzie did, with this idea of making this film [Teknolust], and provides exactly the leap to the next adventure.