You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.

You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.

If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.

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