I was stage-struck from an early age. I just loved the language. We lived quite near Stratford so I would cycle and watch the plays.

It's a great privilege to make a film, to have it shown, and for people to see it.

Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.

Because I've been around a long time I get a bit of leeway that other people don't.

What the Labour movement is about is a broad mass of people actively engaged in a democratic process.

The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week.

We did a film called 'Kes,' which is about a lad with a talent that nobody can recognise, or that nobody chose to recognise.

Gordon Brown is and always will be committed to the interests of big business, so there's no way I want to be involved in the Labour Party again.

Often people write stories about people who are suffering, and they're miserable all the time. That's not the case. You go to the food bank or wherever and there's laughter, there's comedy, there's stupidity, there's silliness and warmth. And that's the reality of people's lives. If you cut out that sense of humor and warmth, you miss the point.

It seems to me the big weakness in most films is the writing. You can learn directing, but you can't learn writing.

As a medium, film has great potential, but its use is dominated by big capital.

We made 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' about the war of independence and the civil war, which were the pivotal moments of Irish history, really. 'Jimmy's Hall' would seem to be a smaller story 10 years later.

If we believe in the free market, then that leads to the big corporations taking power, that leads to this competition to lower wages, and that leads to precarious work.

The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.

I was an understudy in a show called 'One Over The Eight' with Kenneth Williams and Sheila Hancock.

You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.

History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss.

It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.

Paul Laverty is a wonderful writer and we've worked together for a quarter of a century.

All politicians will say they celebrate the NHS, but to a greater or lesser extent, they've all undermined it.

I made one contribution to a film about the 11th of September: there were 11 directors and everyone had a different take on that. Some I thought were valid and some less so, but there was a substantial point that knitted all the films together - a comment on the bombing of the World Trade Center - so there was something to get your teeth into.

You always feel a degree of insecurity about getting through a film.

For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.

When I was young, you were told that if you had a skill, you would find a job for life and you could bring up a family on the wage.