It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

What's been lost is allowing cinema to be artful, playful, to have ambiguity, to have form, to be contemplative, to wish to be art. This slightly timeless approach to reality, like Chekhov in literature, where you look at all humanity and try to find what's transcendent.

I think people crave those meaningful situations, stuff about faith, identity, dilemmas of live paradoxes in our souls. It's going back to a time where lives were really defined by history, and also how you behave in the face of history. It's kind of interesting to go back to that simpler humanity, simpler but deeper.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fiction we're used to.

The truth is, if we have our own reasons for doing something - reasons that we endorse - we're more likely to do it; we're more likely to stick with it.