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I'm not so sure that younger people today really appreciate the enormous bravery that went into the creation and production of that film, or how important a film at the time it really was.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

Being closer to the genesis of this whole period, it captured the importance of the concept of making contact and accurately depicted the paranoia of the time. It's an excellent film.

We wanted to make sure that the film covered the main issues of his life. Musicianship, appearance.

What I felt at that time - we're talking about '61 - was that I couldn't remember seeing a film that reflected the age we were living in.

Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.

I feel that film is inevitably the medium of the future. It has been for years, decades, but more so now than ever.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.