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

Especially living in the South of France.

Where you can be in their shoes and therefore be more involved if they’re people that you recognize.

It’s the sort of subject that always interests me: jealousy and the language of suspicion and guilt. I think it interests people.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I’ve heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

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

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

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.

No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it’s even better.

No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

I started thinking about gender and how it’s an arbitrary thing if you’re born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It’s about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.