David has asked me, a number of people have asked me and said, What performance do you like best or what’s the best film you’ve made and so on and I don’t really have any hesitation that the film I’m least embarrassed by and ashamed of or uneasy about is Shadowlands.

I was on my own union council for twenty-odd years.

I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man, who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.

At my age the only problem is with remembering names. When I call everyone darling, it has damn all to do with passionately adoring them, but I know I’m safe calling them that. Although, of course, I adore them too.

I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant, that don’t come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, and argument and so on, and I can’t do that and I’m not in that bracket at all.

If you’ve ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.

And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by.

I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody’s life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.

David has asked me, a number of people have asked me and said, What performance do you like best or what’s the best film you’ve made and so on and I don’t really have any hesitation that the film I’m least embarrassed by and ashamed of or uneasy about is Shadowlands.

I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that’s ever lived.

And there are certain things, and they are evident, obviously, without being boring about it, but I mean obviously, the two evident and easy ones being Gandhi and Cry Freedom, there are things which I do care about very much and which I would like to stand up and be counted.

I can’t write, I can’t paint, I don’t compose.

I prefer fact to fiction.

In other words, if you – the cost of promoting movies, the advertising and promotion of a movie, the budget is almost as large as the cost of the movie.

I do care about style. I do care, but I only care about style that serves the subject.

I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

I don’t read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.

I just love biography, and I’m fascinated by people who have shifted our destinies or our points of view.

I believe in trade unionism, and I believe in democracy, in democratic trade unionism.

I’m a passionate trade unionist.

Well, I think In Love and War, which had a wonderful performance by Sandy, Sandra Bullock, who the authorities and, the supposed authorities, in cinema didn’t want to know about.

Pier Angeli was in the movie called Sea of Sand that Guy Green directed where this idea came up.

There’s nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.