If you change a location opportunistically, to gain a day on the schedule, which I did more than once, you have to re-rig everything creatively on the spot, and you not only have to be able to do that, but do it with great fluency to keep moving. I used to go apeshit when anything got changed in a film but you live and learn, and I have learned.

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.

You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.

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 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.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

I'm in the film industry, and I very seldom go to the theater now. It could be work, not being in New York, that sort thing - because in New York, you do go to theaters; you can walk to a theater and then walk to a restaurant. But in places you have to drive out to the cineplex to see a movie, it's starting not to be worth it anymore. It's like the days when you went to get a book at the public library. You don't have to do that anymore. You just go on your iPad and all of a sudden you're reading The Duchess of Malfi.