“It’s part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than it being just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.”

You can muscle your way to the top as long as you’re part of the production, which I am. I’m knitted into the money, so it’s very hard to extricate me from the decision-making dynamic.

I genuinely try to make movies I’d want to go and see, movies that are a bit more challenging.

If an actor commits properly to a role, they do a bit mad during a shoot. If they’re going to do that, they should balance themselves by doing a role as a yoga teacher.

I think CGI is interesting but it’s too expensive and limiting in terms of what you can do shot-by-shot.

The reality of any location in Britain being used in a TV program of a film is that something bad is going to happen! That’s the nature of drama. Most of the things that get made or basically grisly detective shows about murders, accidents or medical dramas.

Sometimes my scripts get so dissolved, and they’re so different from when I wrote them originally, that I find it hard to find what I wrote in it.

I’m very superstitious about going on other people’s sets. You have to ask permission of the director; you shouldn’t just turn up and skulk about in the background. It’s very rude. You have to ask them personally. It’s like a vampire being invited into a house.

I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can’t understand each other. It’s also usually my experience of being in America – when I speak no one can understand what I’m saying.

Film is more of a dream when you’re younger. I found it almost impossible to see how you would get into the industry having no connections, nobody in the family being anywhere near it and never meeting anybody that had been on a set.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you’re missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

Doctor Who is pretty dark, I think. Generally its dark; its always been dark.

The things that inspire people to think are what keeps a film alive.

Lots of crime films are about work. Free Fire could have been about a company of plumbers doing pipe-fixing and stuff. But the plumbing film is not so exciting.

The only genre I have any problem with is musicals, but that’s just my own tastes it’s nothing to do with the films.

There’s no way you can shoot low-budget stuff on lots of locations. It’s just a practicality thing because every time you move, it costs time and money.

Even the great bad guys in cinema history, they’re likable.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.

It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

As beautiful as cinema is, it’s a massive part of the problem of why we look at ourselves in the way we do.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

We really are living in the era that all this sci-fi literature and cinema was centered around.

Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.