“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense, That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

I want your madness, only if you promise to be mad about me.

An individual who is afraid to go outdoors for fear of being hit by a meteorite is generally regarded as neurotic.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.

The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.