The far right was on the march in the 1930s, and we defeated the fascists through a great united working-class effort. That sense of unity and strength is what gave people confidence to change things.

I don't think films about working class people are sad at all; I think they're funny and lively and invigorating and warm and generous and full of good things.

We have to defend the migrant workers and give them our support and demand that they have the rights that workers here have from day one, but absolutely hate the system that forces people to leave their country, leave their homes, leave their families, to go somewhere else to be exploited.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

I challenge the idea that films about rich people are escapism and films about working class people are dour and sad. I find the opposite's the case.

If you're a politician, you can see there might be times when, to secure the greater good, you have to take a backwards step. That is a matter of tactics.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.

There has been no more principled opposition to racism than Jeremy Corbyn: he was getting arrested for protesting against Apartheid when the rest of them were doing deals and calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist.

If change is to come, it must come from the working class. That's why telling their story is important. That's why knowing our history is important.

The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?

In general I think that in art you only have the responsibility to tell the truth.

A film has got to demand to be made. Otherwise - if it's just, 'Shall we? Why not?' - you shouldn't make it.

The most enjoyable things are the old eighteenth-century terraces that are still standing, that domestic architecture.

I think that's one of the things that sport teaches you. You are only as good as the team around you.

The European Union is an institution that is in the interest of big business, not the European people. So it's understandable that some people thought we should leave.

I think people think of auteurs as being a dictator shouting over everyone about his vision. That's not the way I think of auteurs or the way I work.

Well, I think by and large, certainly in terms of cinema, American culture dominates our cinema, mainly in the films that are shown in the multiplexes but also in the way that it has a magnetic effect on British films.

I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.

Jimmy's Hall' is set in Ireland in the '30s and everything that went under the camera we had to generate.

Jeremy Corbyn's election was the most hopeful thing since the Labour Party began. He's the first Labour leader who's ever stood on the picket line along with workers.

Cannes is the largest festival of world cinema.

I know there are people who can direct sitting down away from it all at a video monitor. But I can't do that.

It's more interesting to see new people on the screen when you go to the cinema. I don't want to see the same old faces.

I hate programmes where some TV personality looks you in the eye and tells you what to think - the Andrew Marr version of history. I hate the authorial voice telling you what to think.

When I was young, you were told that if you had a skill, you would find a job for life and you could bring up a family on the wage.

For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.

You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.

I made one contribution to a film about the 11th of September: there were 11 directors and everyone had a different take on that. Some I thought were valid and some less so, but there was a substantial point that knitted all the films together - a comment on the bombing of the World Trade Center - so there was something to get your teeth into.

All politicians will say they celebrate the NHS, but to a greater or lesser extent, they've all undermined it.

Paul Laverty is a wonderful writer and we've worked together for a quarter of a century.

It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.

History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss.

You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.

I was an understudy in a show called 'One Over The Eight' with Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock.

The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.

If we believe in the free market, then that leads to the big corporations taking power, that leads to this competition to lower wages, and that leads to precarious work.

We made 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' about the war of independence and the civil war, which were the pivotal moments of Irish history, really. 'Jimmy's Hall' would seem to be a smaller story 10 years later.

As a medium, film has great potential, but its use is dominated by big capital.

It seems to me the big weakness in most films is the writing. You can learn directing, but you can't learn writing.

Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.

Gordon Brown is and always will be committed to the interests of big business, so there's no way I want to be involved in the Labour Party again.

We did a film called 'Kes,' which is about a lad with a talent that nobody can recognise, or that nobody chose to recognise.

The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week.

What the Labour movement is about is a broad mass of people actively engaged in a democratic process.

Because I've been around a long time I get a bit of leeway that other people don't.

Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.

It's a great privilege to make a film, to have it shown, and for people to see it.

I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.

Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can't criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.