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.

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

The only real struggle [in Doctor Strange] was casting spells - learning all these amazing things with fingers, and then remembering what to say at the same time. They would say, 'So you have to put your hands there, not there because the light is going to go [MAKES SOUND] so that kind of masks... but it was all good.

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

We were very clear that this film's [Young Adam] so much about a relationship that's borne out through the sexual contact, and that that's the way they communicate.

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.

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