Danny Boyle

A lot of film directors are quite scared of actors. They are a bit of a nightmare sometimes, but I like them. It looks like cunning, but you try to get extra things from them all the time, by stealth, by making them feel confident, so they trust you and you can push a bit.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

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.

I'm a big sports fan. Football. Cricket.

I love that sense of change that you'd get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

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.

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

I like action movies, even though I think action movies are kind of derided now. But there is something extraordinary about action movies, which is absolutely linked to the invention of cinema and what cinema is and why we love it.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.

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.

I love huge movies. Not sure I am the guy to make them, but you can rely on me being there watching them.

I find that people find a way out of misery through humor and it's humor that's often unacceptable to people who are not in quite such a state of misery.

I kind of call myself an atheist, I suppose - although quite a spiritual atheist, I hope.

It's a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.

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.

The extraordinary thing about India is that it's such a family place. It's full of families everywhere.

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.