John Crowley

The bottom line is, it's a great script and that's very inspiring and makes you want to overcome whatever technical difficulties you come up against.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.

But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.

I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.

Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.

I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.