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.

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

Cannes is the largest festival of world cinema.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.