When you see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.

If there's a principle really worth sticking up for, I'll go the whole way.

I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

'Uprising' was one of the first three or four albums I ever bought in 1980 when I was 13, and that had a strong impact on me.

For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.

I love submarine movies.

When I was growing up on Loch Lomondside, one of the first albums I ever bought was Marley's 'Uprising.' I guess that would have been 1980 - just before he died.

There were many times during the filming of 'Touching the Void' when I wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to make this film.

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.

I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.

With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.

I used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'

I think the parallels of a giant power with overwhelming military superiority and might, with America and Rome, it seems obvious to me.

'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.

For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.

The Internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they're all online. If people have a car to sell, for example, they sell it online; they don't go to the newspaper.

We're all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums.

The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.

Although 'The Anderson Platoon' was what we would now call an 'embedded film' - with all the ambiguities that term implies - somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt's perspective.

Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars.

In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.

The great thing about making a film on a submarine is that it's kind of like making a play. You've got this limited environment.

Everyone's got to make one submarine drama in their life.

I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.

It feels like we're all so familiar now with the traditional three-act structure that, actually, stories that are more complex, more naughty, that allow for disagreement and discussion, are more interesting to us.

People who die in an untimely way who are artists, somehow that validates their art, we feel. Why culturally we feel that, I don't know.

What got me into making movies was that I wanted to be a journalist.

A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.

The interesting thing to me is that somehow the future of movies will become a more social thing... I think that people will see them communally and will be talking about them as they're watching them, in a way, and immediately after watching them, and they'll all become the conversation. I think that's pretty interesting.

Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.

If you can understand, you can feel compassion.

In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which - where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with 'Marley,' I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.

I'm not doing any more music films!

If you want to do 'Sword & Sandals' movies, people think that means it equals 'epic.'

I was a teenager in the '80s, and I was always a bit dismissive of Houston, as I think a lot of people who considered themselves 'cool music fans' were. She was poppy, bubble gum, making music not considered very cool. But you can't help but dance to some of those songs or feel emotionally affected by 'I Will Always Love You.'

Most people in Uganda have something good to say about Amin - 'He was funny; he gave us pride to be African.'

Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things.

You can get good performances in quite sizable roles from people who have never been in front of a camera, people who maybe have never been in front of a movie theater.

In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.

The relationship between director and subject can become very intense. It's a bit like therapy, with lots of transferences going on. It's easy to feel guilty.