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.

It was just me, naked as underneath my clothes right now, as all of you are.

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

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.

I would say, and this sounds like a rather immodest thing to say, but the truth is it's probably the most amazing thing of all, it's pretty much exactly what I thought we were going to make, what I hoped we'd make.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

We [ with Ewan McGregor] decided exactly what we would do at every moment, what the texture would be.