Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.

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.

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.

I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.

It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

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.