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

I made The War Zone when I had just given birth to twins, and my post-partum frame was very much on display there.

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.

There's a thing I really mind hearing, when someone says: "That's not my kind of film, I don't want to go and see that..." I don't believe that, I don't believe that it's possible to write off a whole genre of filmmaking - "oh I don't like subtitled films", or "I don't like black and white films", or I don't like films made before or after, a certain date" - I don't believe that.

Years ago, when James Bulger was murdered, every newspaper front page was talking about evil. At that point, having suppressed it for years, I remembered when I was four or five, I tried to kill my own brother.

Well the truth is, everybody, when they die, leaves a void that cannot be filled.