DANNY BOYLE

I don't want to make pompous, serious films; I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

I want people to leave the cinema feeling that something's been confirmed for them about life.

I have this theory that your first film is always your best film in some way. I always try to get back to that moment when you're not relying on things you've done before.

I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.

Actors want to impress at the beginning, so you take advantage of that by suddenly saying, 'Right, you're here for two weeks.' What you're doing is creating a siege mentality.

You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I've sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.

To be a film-maker, you have to lead. You have to be psychotic in your desire to do something. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, something different.

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination.

I was brought up a very strict Catholic and I don't practice anymore or anything.

I am a sci-fi fan.

Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.

You know what actors are like; they moisturize every night. They're frozen in time.

I like films that have a kind of vivacity about them.

I love cities.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world, so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

Celluloid will be the next decade's black and white.

If you love a book you tend not to follow its surface value, you follow the other things in it.

It's not so much what you learn about Mumbai, it's what you learn about yourself, really. It's a funny old hippie thing, but it's true as well. You find out a lot about yourself and your tolerance, and about your inclusiveness.

I always think, when there's stuff that people don't like, I always say that if I have another success, I'll enjoy it more, but you don't really.

As soon as you think you can do whatever you want and you have whatever great professional in the world waiting to work with you, then you are sunk.

I learned with 'The Beach' that I'm a bit better lower down the radar.

Brian Cox is the nicest guy, but he's so arrogant.

I'm not a 'Star Wars' geek.