Quotes

"Pride & Prejudice (2005) is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfillment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life".

Every time I make a film, I feel it gives me the chance to learn something new. I've been lucky over the past few years. Things have just happened for me.

To me, naturalism is the death of drama. Lee Strasberg came along and the Method f***ed everything up. I find people like Celia Johnson are my favorite actors. I was brought up on films like Brief Encounter (1945) and, for me, they expressed enormous truth. Marlon Brando does not have the monopoly on truth!

I couldn't be a cameraman or a designer or an actor - I have to be a director because I learned how to do that from my dad. Generally, I've never known quite how to fit in in civilian life, but on set, making a film, I know exactly where to go, how to behave and how I fit.

[on filming 'Anna Karenina'] If there was a scene in the book about love then it was in, and if it wasn't about love it was out. So if the audiences are interested in farming practices of the 1800s, they're going to be disappointed.

I'm not a religious man, but I do aspire to some kind of spirituality and I think probably the best way to find that is through love. And eventually to love one other person. And I found that those were the sorts of things Tolstoy was also thinking about, battling with. He was in a similar state and age in his life.

[on 'Anna Karenina'] I conceived it as a ballet with words. I really love the part of my job that is blocking - the movement of actors in space, and their physical relationships, and how you express that through the camera. There's a lot of craft involved in that, but there's also the potential for a lot of emotion.

There's something magical or poetic about physical performance that I'm drawn to - it's almost mystical. But I also think movement in relation to words is really interesting. So it's how the two operate together.

[on setting Anna Karenina on a stage] The choice to shoot it in a theater was about this idea that they were living their lives as if upon a stage. What I found interesting about Russian society at the time was the kind of identity crisis that they were going through socially, and also Anna seems to be going through an identity crisis. The role that she has adopted no longer suits her; she has this violent passion that needs to break out.

Filmmaking is an expression of our soul. It's who we are at the most fundamental. It's the closest thing to my essence there is. I'm not very good expressing that in other ways. I'm not very good talking to people, I'm not very good at dinner parties. That's where I allow myself to be revealed. [2017]