CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

By the time I was 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make films.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.

I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favourite of their performances.

In Hollywood there's a great openness, almost a voracious appetite for new people. In England there's a great suspicion of the new. In cultural terms, that can be a good thing, but when you're trying to break into the film industry, it's definitely a bad thing.

My approach with actors is to try and give them whatever it is they need from me. Direction to me is about listening and responding and realizing how much they need to know from me and how much they have figured out for themselves, really.

Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

We all wake up in the morning wanting to live our lives the way we know we should. But we usually don't, in small ways. That's what makes a character like Batman so fascinating. He plays out our conflicts on a much larger scale.

I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

I think there has been this increasing misperception that kids will not respond to something because it's also for adults. I think that often that tends to get underestimated.

But 'Memento' was so successful, such a huge cult hit, almost on the scale of a large film. If that had happened, with all the acclaim, before the next job, I'd have found it very difficult to figure out what to do next.

For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. He's not from another planet, or filled with radioactive gunk. I mean, Superman is essentially a god, but Batman is more like Hercules: he's a human being, very flawed, and bridges the divide.

To be honest, I don't enjoy watching movies much when I'm working. They tend to fall apart on me a bit.

You know when Hollywood does a great big blockbuster that really wraps you up in a world, and lets you believe in extraordinary things that move you in some way, in an almost operatic sensibility? That to me is the most fun I have at the movies.

I never considered myself a lucky person. I'm the most extraordinary pessimist. I truly am.

Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously.

I'm taking a bit of a wait-and-see attitude towards 3D.

But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.

I've been interested in dreams since I as a kid and I've wanted to do a film about them for a long time.

I don't particularly enjoy watching films in 3D because I think that a well-shot and well-projected film has a very three-dimensional quality to it, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the technology.

When you play a videogame, you could be a completely different person than you are in the real world, certain aspects of the way your brain works can be leveraged for something you could never do in the real world.

I made 'Batman' the way I made every other film, and I've done it to my own satisfaction - because the film, truly, is exactly the way I wanted it to be.

But I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.

Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.

I'm very happy where 3-D is going, which is that it's becoming a choice - and thankfully, most people are still choosing 2-D.