My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.

In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.

I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.