Anybody knows who lives with animals, they teach you more about what it is to be a good human than most people: patience, goodheartedness, enthusiasm, presence, forgiveness, focus, restfulness, honesty.

There's an alarm bell that goes off in my head if I can sense that I'm making a mistake.

Daily absorption in the physical actualities of nature is life as I need it to be: it means I am connected to such large things - sky, sea, hill, the vagaries of weather, the undeniable needs of animals - that I can disappear as a subject of interest, I can exist without self-consciousness. The city is a challenge for me, however thrilling a few days prove, for its insatiable overstimulation and the rarity of quiet. The city makes people bigger than they need to be.

Alexander Trocchi was an existentialist. He was looking at an alienated artist in the post-war period. It's modern because it applies now as well.

To be honest the work that a producer does is work that I've done for most of my working life. It's work that I started to do, for example, when I worked with Sally Potter on Orlando. We developed it together over five years.

This film [Teknolust] in particular, showing the way in which having a sexual dialogue with someone can be something developing and changeable and maybe uncomfortable and complicated. Just complicated and human, no more and no less.

There's nothing I'm particularly keen to hide about my humanity.