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.
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.
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.
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 find man's inhumanity to man extraordinary,,, I can't get my head around it.
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.
