Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.

I love the cinema, but I'm not a fascist about it. I've had some of my best experiences watching things on TV. But if I were Stalin, I would force everyone to be in the theater.

That's the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.

I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

In something like 'Frank,' which is a comedy, albeit a strange and emotional one, you can absolutely put in deleted scenes, and we did because they were just funny and great, but they weren't necessary in the overall structure.