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.

We have what we call 'fake left' politicians, like Ed Miliband and those who went before him.

Film is one small voice in a great cacophony of noise from newspapers, from the television, from social media, so it can have a little dent, you know? It can help to create a climate of opinion.

You'll get unsociable people whatever the nationality, colour, race or creed. I guess the British abroad have probably got the worst record of anyone.

The BBC is very aware of its role in shaping people's consciousness… it's manipulative and deeply political.

My mum was a peacemaker, and in personal things I tend to do that, because I can't deal with personal conflict. I find that horrible.

Iain Duncan Smith and his regime, they wanted to make the poor suffer and then humiliated them by telling them that their poverty was their own fault and, to demonstrate that, if you're not up to mark then you're sanctioned and the money stops.

I've been going to Labour party meeting for over 50 years.

There's a heresy which is perpetuated by film school that to be a great director you have to write your own stuff.

Preparation is really important for actors; they need to know who they are, where they're from, and the experiences up to the point that we make the film.

Those in power always try to distort reality, to suit their needs and keep things safe.

Surprise is something that's very difficult to act.

Every four or five films we've made a film that has gone on TV first. It's quite nice to tap into the TV audience, but it is nice to see it on the big screen too.

The worst thing about being a freelance film director is that you're scrambling around Soho with a briefcase, looking for somewhere to make phone calls. That was my position for 10 years.

If all political parties are committed to the role of the free market, the politicians act as, I don't know, as traffic policemen; they stand outside the ring and let the real decisions be slugged out by entrepreneurs. That doesn't seem to me a proper democracy.

What strikes me - we're apparently at the mercy of an economic system that will never work and the big question is, how do we change it, not how do we put up with it.

The Holocaust is as real a historical event as World War II itself and not to be challenged.

The old Craven Cottage stadium at Fulham, before they built the river stand; that was a great place to watch football. When the football wasn't very good, people used to turn around and watch the boats on the river.

I think the Norweigan model of municipalities owning cinemas and being programmed by people who know about films is a good one.

The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners.

People talk about Thatcherism all the time. I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of '45.

It's time to put back on the agenda the importance of public ownership and public good, the value of working together collaboratively, not in competition.

If you have a society where a large section believe they are not part of the political discourse, that is a situation for trouble.

The Labour election of 1945 was a tremendous victory for democratic ownership of the economy.

I'm not a great fan of very short films.