When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.

British people still wear clothes. By clothes I mean actual clothes: jackets and shirts and ties and suits. The spirit of Beau Brummell is still visible. English men make an effort. We’ve lost that in the US. Everyone is more concerned with being comfortable.

You always notice a facelift on a woman. It's a tightness around the ears, and the scar is usually inside the ears. If I suspect it's been done, I usually move around until I can see it. But with a man, it actually pulls your beard and your sideburns back, and that's what's so strange.

There's a different kind of comfort that comes from knowing that you are putting your best foot forward. It's called psychological comfort. Look at a picture of the Coney Island boardwalk in 1925. Men were in full-on three-piece suits, hats. They may have only had one suit. But they pressed it. They made it look as good as possible.

I try to be nice, I try to respect other people, but over the years I've learned that all this stuff we do is a bunch of crap. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its place. We are living in a material world, so why not live with something beautiful?

Fashion is, after all, a form of escapism, and in fact people are buying more special things than ever, nowadays. They deny and deny themselves, and wait and wait, and then they get sick of it and spend to make themselves feel better.

Certain directors are known for a certain kind of beauty; it becomes their signature.