The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.
— David Farr
I love telling stories. I don't really think in terms of clear 'aims.'
The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.
When you go into a forest, anything can happen.
All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.
The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.
Sometimes we don't want to be lectured; we prefer to be taken on a journey.
The 'Ramayana' explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.
I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.
I think, for any writer, when you write, you just write.
As a director, I start with the visual.
As you enter the world of myth, you have immediately a wonderful freedom.
'Hamlet' is so modern; 'Coriolanus' is utterly alien to our consciousness, and that makes it difficult for us.
We don't live in vacuums; we do care about the world, and we do want to believe our country is doing the right thing on our behalf.
Perhaps I'm temperamentally driven to see things from the point of view of the attacked rather than the attacker.
The character of Robin Hood stands for the deep anger of the dispossessed against the ruling classes.
Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises.
Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.
I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.
In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.
The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story.
I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.
I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.
'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.
We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.
I don't like selling myself. It's a sort of shy arrogance.
The world in the '90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water.
'Fall Of A City' aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.
We go into nature to transform.
Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.
There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.
The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.
Theatre is a bastard form. I'm always proud of that. That's what makes it taste of life.
'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.
Write first, worry later.
I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.
You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!
It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.
To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.
