“All good, clean stories are melodrama, it’s just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.”

Having grown up far, far away in a small country town in Australia, I was only slightly aware of hip-hop.

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.

The race is long but in the end it is only with YOURSELF.

There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn’t make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I wouldn’t take a directing job if I didn’t think it was enriching life.

I really believe musical form will go on. There’s got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.

When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.

One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It’s an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis.

I’ve always loved the old epics that tell a simple emotional story, whether it’s the tumultuous relationship between Rhett and Scarlett or Lawrence of Arabia’s passion to get lost in a faraway place.

I always have a point of view. It may not be right, but it’s my own.

I am always worried when someone says, ‘This is perfect.’

Advice is a form of nostalgia.

I never see things I make in the same way that the audience does. You can never do that.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

A lot of people say the sitcom is dead. I think they’re right to some extent, in that the shows they’re putting out are all the same.

If I switch showrunners and I get to stay on the show, I approach it like it’s their show, and I’m here to write their music for them.

We’ll show the fire how to burn.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

I was raised in the theater and, as it turned out, a TV show was like performing a new one-act play. So, it was really no different.

We figured you could download live shows for days, so we decided to go for a cream-of-the-crop approach, but not just take the best vocal or the best performances.

When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there.

I think it’s a promising time which will show a lot of diversification that we’ve seen in the past.