Films are made all over the world all the time and only a thin slice of that product is Hollywood.

When I was young I used to sit in the cinema thinking wouldn't it be great if you could have a film in which the characters were like real people instead of being like actors.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins.

I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.

My work is about life as you and I experience it. You're either lucky or you're not lucky; either your relationship works or it doesn't.

But films should be voyeuristic. What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?

There's a constant drip and trickle of life that goes into one's awareness really and consciousness of things.

I discover what my film is by embarking on the journey of making it.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.

The bait we set, never truly entraps the love, but lust.

A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt that the unique spirit embodied by this country has worked, not just to make the world safer, but to make it better.

A bully can only make you feel bad about yourself if you let them.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

Everything on earth has happened before, nothing is new, but woe to the lovers who fail to discover a fresh blossom in every future kiss.

You may as soon find a living man who does not breathe, as a living Christian who does not pray.

To the audience it doesn't really matter how much the director struggled with an actor. It's the result that counts.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in their times.