When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.

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

I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed he thought Americans were the ones on TV. I didn't know you had accents. I didn't know you had a class system. I didn't know you were like us. To which the answer is, probably only where I grew up, but while we're at it don't watch television and think it's the United States of America.

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.

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.

I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

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.