DAVID FARR

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.

Write first, worry later.

The character of Robin Hood stands for the deep anger of the dispossessed against the ruling classes.

We go into nature to transform.

All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.

Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.

I love telling stories. I don't really think in terms of clear 'aims.'

Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises.

I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.

It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.

Perhaps I'm temperamentally driven to see things from the point of view of the attacked rather than the attacker.

In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.

The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.

You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!

I don't like selling myself. It's a sort of shy arrogance.

'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.

The world in the '90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water.

I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.

The 'Ramayana' explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.

We don't live in vacuums; we do care about the world, and we do want to believe our country is doing the right thing on our behalf.

I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.

We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.