Yes, to me that`s one of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre - that fear of conspiracy. It`s definitely something that I have a fear of - not being in control of your own life. I think that`s something people can relate to, and those genres are most successful when they derive the material from genuine fears that people have.

A lot of it is being done in commercials and music videos. I`ve never done them, but I think that those are forms in which cross-cutting and parallel action are absolutely standard and accepted as a mainstream language. Film-makers like myself enjoy the fruits of that experimentation and absorption by the mainstream. I think people`s capacity to absorb a fractured mise-en-scene is extraordinary now compared to forty years ago.

I never considered myself a lucky person. I`m the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.

But there`s a very limited pool of finance in the UK. To be honest, it`s a very clubby kind of place. In Hollywood there`s a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there`s a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you`re trying to break into the film industry, it`s definitely a bad thing. I never had any luck with interesting people in small projects when I was doing Following. Never had any support whatsoever from the British film industry, other than Working Title, the company that [producer] Emma Thomas was working for at the time. They let me use their photocopier, stuff like that, which is not to be underestimated.

The term `genre` eventually becomes pejorative because you`re referring to something that`s so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started. What I`m trying to do is to create modern equivalents that speak to me of those tropes that have more of the original power.

[On casting Batman] "Batman is a marvelously complex character-somebody who has absolute charm and then, just like that, can turn it into ice-cold ruthlessness. There are very few actors who can do that, and Christian is one of them."

[On using CGI in Batman Begins] "I think there`s a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal, I know I`ve felt it. The demand we put on ourselves was to be as spectacular as possible, but not depend on computer graphics to do it."

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn`t really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He`s not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he`s a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it. - commenting on working with actors who have distinctively different styles.

...I studied English Literature. I wasn`t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don`t, in small ways. That`s what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. Alien, Blade Runner just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.

I think there`s a vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal. I know I`ve felt it.