Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

I'm really interested in the idea of long, long life and transformation and immortality.

I was just talking to Benedict [Cumberbatch] who's got a little baby and knows his father lives in his phone. We as humans are evolving really fast, so everyday we're hit with that.

Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

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