Being in a shop and the 18-year-old girl behind the counter saying to me, 'Are you Cate? I saw your film', and then saying how much it affected them, or that they've seen it twice, or that they cried - that's enough to make anyone happy.

One of the hardest things for me is having to discuss, quote unquote, the state of Australian cinema. I don't want to talk about that, because I'm a film-maker. I don't make films for any reason outside of personal ones. I feel like a fraud if I talk about the industry, because my industry is me and the people I work with and a couple of film-makers. It's not a factory.

...we came from backgrounds where gender roles were really strong. My dad was a truck driver and my mum worked and had to look after the kids and do all the housework. That was totally accepted and even today if I see my dad wash a dish it makes me really uncomfortable.

Fairy tales have an awful underlying violence to them. I think women relate to them because walking through the streets at night, you often feel scared. In fairy tales women are always pursued, or they're lost and they have to be rescued. They have this real erotic, dark element that was really influential when we looked at the film. It wasn't on the page, it was something we created.