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

You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.

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

I hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.

I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.

When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.