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Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo, then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location, and the story's about this British journalist.

The craziest place I've probably ever visited while filming would have to be Jordan. I did a small test shoot for a test movie. We arrived in Jordan, and we stayed in Amman for a night. Then we drove down for three hours into the middle of the Wadi Rum Desert, which is in the absolute middle of nowhere. It was insane.

I didn't want to make a literal film about Detroit, because it felt like what they were experiencing was more universal than that.

I can honestly say I've never chosen a film because where it's shot is convenient.

I love great locations in movies, and I couldn't believe I'd never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunting place.

I was so happy that it filmed in New York not only because it's an amazing city, but also because a lot of people across the world somehow started to think about New York as a dangerous place to be and envisioned it as some war zone after that happened.

We shot in a place called Asheville, which is like beautiful, beautiful forests. And then part of it we shot all the reaping stuff, which was just crazy - because the reaping in the book and in the script is such an emotional thing for everyone. It really did feel like that when we were shooting it.

When I think of Hungarian films, I think of despair and bleakness, and what's more, despair and bleakness of indefensible duration.