I grew up in a city, I’m a city person – I go on holiday and I’m bored.
There’s lots of things that can be solved with cash.
If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn’t do it.
The awards season gives a chance for independent films to have a bit of longevity in the press and the media.
Although I behave in a quite reserved way in my personal life, give me a stage and I’ll be as flamboyant as I can.
Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin’s scripts. There’s a huge amount of lines. There’s a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.
If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.
Film industry is a pretty brutal business. If you fall too far behind, all of the perfectionism in the world won’t save you.
It’s not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it’s what you learn about yourself, really. It’s a funny old hippie thing, but it’s true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.
I’d love to do a modern-day musical that’s full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.
Directing is a mixture of compromise and perfectionism. When you lose the judgment of which is more important at any particular moment, you’re time is over. They find you out and send you packing.
My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.
Even though one of them is about an Edinburgh junkie and ones a little boy of eight in Manchester, you want them to always portray their world in such a vivid way that the audience can disappear inside the story.
Its easy to like the most popular films, but I have a great fondness for A Life Less Ordinary.
Although computer chips now are thinner, they’re more powerful, they’re not as reliable. You’d harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they’re reliable.
I always say to anybody who’s going over to America for the first time, ‘Whatever you do, go and see a popular mainstream film with a big audience.’ Because people shout out. You never get that in Britain. Everybody’s so quiet, scared to laugh. It’s like being in church.
My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher’s mum – she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.