There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.

I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors.

The only answer to "Are you Beatles or Stones?" is, "I'm both."