[on if the film festival experience has gotten any easier] I don't know if I'd use the word "easier"... it [the festival circuit] is quite a life, you know. You get to travel to all these different places and see the world. You meet loads of nice people and get free gifts. Best of all, you are allowed to be indulgent and talk about your work with people who actually listen and care. It's not exactly a hard life, is it? [laughs] I'm not going to knock it.

I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's. I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or 'grim' or 'gritty', I just think, 'Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.' My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

Filmmaking is such a deliberate process, but within that there's room to be instinctive. Sometimes I don't understand why I've written what I've written or why my characters are doing what they're doing, but it feels right.

No matter what happens to you in your life, all around you there are amazing things.

Mainly it's just real life around me that inspires me. I see someone on the bus, and I want to write about them. But among filmmakers, I suppose Tarkovsky. He has something spiritual about him. His book 'Sculpting in Time' is on my bedside table.

Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict - but I don't see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That's not who I am.

[Accepting her Oscar for "Wasp"] "As we say in England, this is the 'dogs bollocks'."