The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

When I say that it's taken us [with Luca Guadagnino ] 11 years to make this film, what I mean is that it was 11 years ago that we started to talk about a kind of cinema that we wanted to make together.

For me, sex is a refraction of the thing about identity. In the sexual contact, which is usually - but not exclusively - between two people, you do retain separate people.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.

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

Even beyond sexuality, I'm generally interested in identity.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.