“You have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can’t do.”

Well, I think just the fact that you are making your first film is a huge step.

I looked at Brief Encounter very closely, to be honest.

I’ve always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors.

I was watching Monster’s Ball, which is a fabulous movie. It’s just a little gem: beautifully shot, and shot in a way I never would have done.

Their every instinct – and I have to say this is without exception – is to iron out the bumps, and It’s always the bumps that are the most interesting stuff.

Foxes was a movie that didn’t do a lot of business but it didn’t do too badly critically and eventually they offered me other things.

I think that there are points where you become so close to an actor,

The interesting thing was that next I tried a film called Star Man, which Michael Douglas was producing.

Somebody said that I’m a bit like a sponge, grabbing things here and there, soaking stuff up. [As a director] you have to be, really.

The danger is that if you have a bunch of ideas that you forget to use.

If you are prepared to make a fool of yourself for them then you usually get that back.

Obviously, in dealing with a relationship, sexuality has to be involved, and jealousy and emotions like that. And I don’t know, I’ve always been intrigued by those emotions.

I think you get better at staring into space.

And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

I was speaking to Ridley Scott the other day and he makes a film every 18 months. He’s amazing really.

I want to be here for a long time, so I am going to do everything I have to do to be here.

I’m the kind of parent who asks my kids questions like, ‘What would be your ideal thing to do in the summer?’

I think I started doing covers when I was… what, like 9 or 10?

Nothing me and Kanye can do musically was gonna match the event of what we were trying to do. So we were trying to deliver an album and experience at one time; that was the idea for ‘Watch The Throne’.

I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.

If Donald Trump builds the wall the way he builds Trump Towers, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it.

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.