As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers.

British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.

When you haven't got a job, a joke is about the only thing that's free.

The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.

At 19, I got signed up for commercials, it was easy money.

What we do is service a story first, and then you figure out how to pay for it later. If the narrative isn't your primary focus, then the movie is going to become diluted, and you don't have a movie that is as good as it could be, so it probably won't make as much money.

I have donated money to campaigns. And I have been known to take to the street in protest. But I am more committed to my immediate politics than general politics.

I didn't go to film school; I studied fine art - I learned how to be a filmmaker on everybody else's money.