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Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves.

What I think I learned from working on 'Moonlight' is you see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter.

Crimes are more often committed out of fear than wickedness. People live frightened, desperate lives.

I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic.

I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime 'ouvre,' there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.

Every murder turns on a bright hot light, and a lot of people... have to walk out of the shadows.

That's my sense of how crime works: that it's not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating.

I am interested in the ordinary sort of threat. I know that people are interested in things like serial killers and what have you, but actually, those aren't the sort of crimes that really happen very much. The sort of crimes that happen tend to be more of a domestic nature and quite banal, but the psychology behind them is always fascinating.

Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course.