With 'Atonement,' I put a lot of pressure on myself, and then I made an advert for Chanel, which 'broke the camel's back' emotionally.
The more you practise happiness, the better you get at it. So if you spend lots of time practising being depressed, you're going to get really good at being depressed. And if you spend lots of time practising being happy, you're going to get better at being happy.
American actors are very different to British actors who have generally studied and been brought up culturally with the sense that the writer is the star and that their job is to serve the writing. Whereas Hollywood actors are brought up to believe that the actor is the star, and everything and everybody is in the service of them.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
'Pride' is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.
When I left college, I though that I would be immediately embraced by the film world and instead found myself sitting in a squat for three years not knowing what to do with my life.
I find man's inhumanity to man extraordinary,,, I can't get my head around it.
I'm very interested in dance, and I'm very interested in how people express themselves through movement. And of course, cinema is a kinetic art form. It's almost the point of cinema - it's time-based and movement-based.
I kind of muddled through 'Pride & Prejudice,' but with 'Atonement,' I knew what I was doing. That makes it sound like I had no doubt. I had doubts - I didn't know whether it would work. But I knew exactly what I wanted to try to do.
Studios are often very nervous of things they don't recognize, by which I mean things that haven't been done before, and therefore, they take a really original idea, and they recognize the originality, and then they try and make it look like something they recognize. So they try to turn it into something far more procedural.
