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Never take no for answer, and try to make films that turn you on.

I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.

I think I've made some pretty decent films in the '80s and '90s.

I had an almost fetishistic attraction to film technology.

I'm incredibly nostalgic for the '80s, because I think that's when Geek Culture really kicked in to high gear.

A life of very, very serious, po-faced films would drive me nuts. I need - and I'm fortunate to have - a fairly varied menu in that respect. I mean, I was shooting 'Mamma Mia!' at the same time as I was doing Michael Winterbottom's 'Genova'. That was a very, very bizarre summer.

Growing up in the eighties, you could go from one style in a movie to another style, and that was okay. In the nineties, you had to obey your niche. You had to follow the code and never step outside of exactly what you're doing.

I wanted to do a movie about being really good at something, yet being socially awkward and not as advanced in your personal life as you are in your creative life.

I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience.

I probably did pack a lifetime's work into the 1980s.