I never imagined early on that it would last. David Hare and I used to sit around gloomily at the Royal Court and tell each other we had ten years and we had got to make the best of them. - on expectations for his writing career Show less «

[on Dangerous Liaisons (1988)] It's interesting that it chimed with the high point of Thatcherism. That was fortuitous because I first thought about it. When you see it now the resonance is slightly different. It seems now to be to do with everyone else's sex life. When I was re-looking at it in rehearsal I thought, 'This is rather odd, it seems no longer to be about institutionalized selfishness. The thing about "Liaisons" is that by identifying certain things that were going on at the time and pushing them to their logical extreme in a kind of mathematical way, Laclos just laid everything bare. It has been said it is the best sex education a boy could have. It is very wise about what buttons people push and how one's vanity is all tied up with a question of sex. Show less «

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films. Don't do masterpieces, because they'll be disappointing. I don't think that. If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right. Show less «

At my school I would say that it was more of a sort of romantic thing than an actual sexual thing, but people did have crushes on other boys. It was sort of staring at people in chapel. Interestingly enough, the people at school who did become gay were not the people who were involved in that kind of thing. What went on most of the time was people fell for boys who looked like girls and were a bit younger" - on adolescent homosexuality in his school Show less «

[on Imagining Argentina (2003)'s reception] The first screening was the press screening. The producer and I went in and checked out the print - absolutely fine - went out to dinner and I then had a call saying 'I'm sorry to tell you it's been booed'. I said, 'How awful'. 'Don't worry, it often happens at Venice, nothing to worry about'. And then the next night was the proper opening where there was a six-minute standing ovation so I thought, 'Oh, that's all right'. Show less «

[on Mary Reilly (1996)] I wrote it because I really liked it and ever since I was a child I've had a weakness for reading Edgar Allan Poe stories; I have a weakness for that kind of Gothic, and I've always liked it. I read the novel and apart from the fact it didn't really have an ending, which caused us a great deal of difficulty down the line, it seemed to me a very ingenious idea to come up; the Jekyll and Hyde story through the eyes of this housemaid who was enamoured of Dr Jekyll. Stephen (Frears) and I have different views of this because I very much like the film and he doesn't, and there was a deal of suffering along the way, largely caused by the fact that I think the film was too expensive and too elaborate. To spend $42m on two people in a house could be deemed extravagant. Even if we'd entered by a different door we could have done something more modest and perhaps more powerful although, as I say, I like the film. I like Julia Roberts and I think she does a jolly good Irish accent. Show less «