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Weirdly enough, I live in London - was born there and have lived there all my life - but I hadn't made a film in London for a long time. I hadn't found the right subject. I liked going away, to some far flung place.

Living in London has become incredible. I suppose it's easy to love where you live if you love what you're doing. But this is not just a visit: it's my home.

London has always moved and surprised me, reinventing itself in ways both fresh and familiar. It's a contrary, complex and creative city, an anarchist of a thousand faces - fickle and unfailing, tender and bleak, ambitious and callous.

I grew up in a middle class English family just outside London. I wasn't surrounded by that speedy city lifestyle, it was a little mellower.

I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

I enjoyed being in California for a while. But that's the thing about London: you can't really shake it. I've always had the impression when I was in L.A. for long periods of time that simultaneously my life was happening somewhere else, and I'm missing it.

I grew up in a small town about 40 miles outside London, but it was a fairly cosmopolitan household.

Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

I came back out here from England and I was there for a while and it was beautiful and it is just great to see London going from Spring to Summer and Autumn.