For weeks after 9/11 you could smell the dust and pulverised concrete in New York, and the National Guard came in, so there was a military presence on the streets. It was intense. Overwhelming. Heartbreaking.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

The fact is that war films, by their very nature, are pitched at a high dramatic range.

Somewhere it is written that parents who are critical of other people's children and publicly admit they can do better are asking for it.

Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.

When a child does bad things, the parents are always going to love their child even if they do something bad.

A film unit is like a family, you not just work together but laugh, cry and fight also.