My dad? He died when I was 19, which is a bad time for your dad to die, because there's an awful lot of things you have to resolve with your parents past your teens if you've been a difficult teenager.

What you do is get the right director and the right screenwriter and the right cast. It's a fantastic job.

I've driven all through America and I know there are a lot of clever people between the coasts. But they have a slightly old-fashioned view of the world. Whereas New York is one of the most multicultural, multiracial, tolerant places on Earth.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

Until my early teens, I lived with my mother in New York, and I spent a lot of time in the company of her friends, mostly artists and designers, such as Andy Warhol, Ross Bleckner and Francesco Clemente, none of whom had kids, so I was like their shared child.

Can a great artist be mean-spirited, grasping, harsh to his family, violent in his emotions, vindictive in his hatreds, an all-purpose scoundrel? If our test cases are the likes of Wagner, Picasso, and, let me say, Dickens, the answer is a resounding yes.

I was one of those children forced into fighting at the age of 13, in my country Sierra Leone, a war that claimed the lives of my mother, father and two brothers. I know too well the emotional, psychological and physical burden that comes with being exposed to violence as a child or at any age for that matter.

In my family I was never known as the fighter, like I became all of a sudden.