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

If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.

I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.

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

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.

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

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word "lavish" and everything being magnificent.