What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.

It's a real comfort zone for me to feel alien.

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.

As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

It was an amazing performer. Very temperamental, it spent a lot of time in its trailer.

I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.