Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.
If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.
The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.
A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.
I don't want to make pompous, serious films.
I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.
I've always wanted to do a space movie.
That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.
I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.
I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.
Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.
I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.
I'd love to do a cop film in America. That's a genre I absolutely adore.
I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.
I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.
As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.
Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.
My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.
Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.
I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.
I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.
I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.
I trained in the theatre.
