The female attention I have to struggle hardest with is from my two-year-old daughter.

I'm amazed by just constantly - there's not a week that goes past where there's not someone in Ulan Bator or Rio De Janeiro suddenly says, 'Ooh, 'Downton' started this week.' You completely forget it's staggered across the world.

Oh, it is quite possible that none of us in 'Downton' will ever again get the ratings this has had. But from a career point of view, it has opened so many doors.

We take so many of our freedoms for granted nowadays - I can travel where I like, I can have a baby when I like, I can do any job I want - but I do think chivalry has been lost a little bit.

As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

The most fun about working with special effects is that you have to really rely on your imagination to build the scene. You can't actually see how what you're doing will fit in ultimately and you look silly while doing it but when you see the finished product it becomes something amazing!

Being a pop artist or making music like a jingle or something - I don't do that.

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly.