The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths.

The irony of a director going to film festivals is you never get to see any of the films.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

Nowadays filmmakers tend to recycle the same cliches over and over again.

Films about the English monarchy, they tend to have a lavishness, sumptuous imagery, it's all very posh and rich.

There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.

I was always obsessed with finding truly researched images to add authenticity, out of that came something totally contemporary and modern. Research is very key to my process because over and over again, reality provides more interesting images than you could have invented.