I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.

I think it's good to have pressure on yourself. The worst crime is to get kind of really complacent.

'Don't Look Now' is a masterpiece. I think it's the best-edited movie of all time. I adore it.

There are plenty of movies that you need to chew on a bit. Movies that you return to and see something different in the second time around.

If you go back to your home town or you're reunited with school friends, its always slightly bittersweet because as much as there's nice things in terms of seeing them again, the town has changed without you, and you're no longer a part of it.

I think you write the film that you want to see, and you try and do it honestly, and you can't control people's responses, really.

Maybe directors who are more interested in realism and naturalism come from cities, where they see things on their doorstep every day. But growing up as a kid in a very pretty but ever-so-slightly boring town, where not a great deal happened, encouraged me to be more escapist, more imaginative, and more of a daydreamer.

I'm a big believer in keeping the stage directions really tight.

Tony Scott, Walter Hill, Michael Mann - I'm a big action fan, full stop. And even though Michael Mann is the more celebrated film-maker than Tony Scott, I love them both in different ways.

My favorite film of all time is 'Raising Arizona.' I watched it again as soon as it was over. I had it on VHS, rented it, and I watched it and said, 'I want to watch that again, right now.' I think I did the same with something like 'Goodfellas,' which is a completely different genre.

Every time I watch a Clint Eastwood film, I'm in touch with my feminine side, I've developed a searing man-crush on Clint Eastwood.

I think, 'Scott Pilgrim,' it was something where the general audience didn't necessarily understand straight away what it was.

I use music to focus, like an internal motor.

For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.

If you're on a road trip, you need driving music.

Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.

Sometimes, some things have to settle, and you have to think about the intention of it.

When I am not working, I try to watch more than one film a day if I can.

Whenever I'm writing a script, I'm scoring myself by playing the right kind of music.

Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.

I remember seeing 'Gremlins' and having my mind blown and seeing 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' at 13, and it was this hugely aspirational experience.

I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make.

I'd like to do some things over again. I never want to repeat anything that went well, though - I just want to do better at slightly different things.

My parents used to talk about Sergio Leone films a lot. And I got really into them. I love Clint Eastwood. I love the camera angles. I love the music.

The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.

I'm very happy with the response for everything I've done, but, you know, sometimes you get things like, 'Oh, 'Spaced' Series One wasn't as good as 'Spaced' Series Two.' Or 'Shaun of the Dead' is not as good as 'Spaced,' or, 'Hot Fuzz' is not as good as 'Shaun.' Or, now, 'The World's End' is not 'Shaun of the Dead.'

The first TV show I worked on was with the guys from 'Little Britian,' Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who did a show in 1995 I directed, 'Mash and Peas.'

'Scott Pilgrim' is something that was a little bit more difficult to put in one box. But, to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing about the movie.

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

I tire of franchises, remakes, and endless sequels.

I was never a DC kid - I went through a phase from, like, 11 to 17 where I would try to buy as many Marvel titles as possible. And '2000 AD' was kind of the sort of sci-fi/punk of British comics.

I definitely went through a period when I was a teenager when every girl was 'The One' and every break-up was the 'Worst Thing That Had Ever Happened.'

We need to make more original movies, and audiences would do well to support original movies for the future of the medium.

Wes Anderson deserves an award for sheer persistence of vision.

Between the ages of 18 and 20, I made three hour-long films. One was a superhero film called 'Carbolic Soap.' One was a cop film called 'Dead Right.' And the other was called 'A Fistful Of Fingers.'

By the time I got to Bournemouth Art College, I'd been so inspired by Sam Raimi and Robert Rodriguez and their tiny, no-budget films that I decided to do a feature-length version of 'Fistful Of Fingers.'

I think the premise of somebody trying to recreate a night from their teenage years stuck with me as something potentially very tragically comic.

I would say 'American Werewolf in London' is like an unconventional buddy movie: even if the buddy dies 20 minutes in, he still remains throughout the picture, and their partnership is one of the best things in the movie.

I guess a lot of comic-book adaptations strive for realism. Christopher Nolan is making Batman seem very real and very serious.

I know it's become an ongoing thing about whether videogames are art, and I think there's plenty of examples of things that use the form in a fascinating way. Things that are more surreal or artistic, like 'Katamari Damacy' or 'Vib-Ribbon.'

I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films.

It's funny: sometimes with 'Spaced,' people would try and read too much into something I'd done, with the references meaning something more than they do.

When you're doing a car chase movie, you're sitting in car waiting for places or grips or stuff for quite a while.

Car chases are as painstaking to make as they are fun to watch. They take a lot of time, and you have to keep the energy up.

If you ever watch police chases on, like, helicopter cams, they very quickly become nightmarish when you start to see the police coming in from the edge of the frame. I always find that terrifying.

In a lot of action films, a lot of guys are driving muscle cars or vintage cars, whereas in reality, a lot of getaway drivers would actually choose, like, commuter cars and find a way to blend into freeway traffic as quickly as possible.

Usually if I find a film that's challenging, that I'm intrigued by, I want to watch it again knowing what the ending is. I found that with something like 'The Godfather Part II.' I think it took me three watches to fully experience it in the way it was intended.

There have been recorded cases of people learning how to fly a plane after playing a flight simulator, but there's never been a case of someone learning to fight by playing 'Tekken.'

The idea of fighting your new girlfriend's ex-lovers, 'Street Fighter' style, is the ultimate geek wish-fulfilment.

A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they're striving for some kind of realism, like 'Iron Man' or 'The Dark Knight,' or they're very stylised and gritty, like 'Sin City' and '300.'