Director

I was in New York one day, and this guy ran off a bus, grabbed me, and told me that 'Maurice' had changed his life. I've also had it many, many times in England.

I wanted to make a movie once at Lake of the Woods, where my parents had a cabin, which I now have. We actually planned, we wrote a whole screenplay about a kind of Indian spiritual group that was at Lake of the Woods. We weren't calling it that but it was Lake of the Woods. We wrote a whole screenplay about it but we couldn't get funding for it.

If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven't seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen.

I like a lot of good dialogue if it is well-acted.

In 'A Room With a View' there's a lovely scene with Julian Sands and Helena Bonham-Carter in a wheat field. It was simply the right time of day: late afternoon, that golden light, wheat and poppies... So romantic. But I had no idea it would turn out that well, since we so rarely shoot in a studio.

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

This may sound corny, but I've always liked to make things that were beautiful.

Love is the absolute basis of my career.

It's important to see the work of as many directors as possible but you must not become self-conscious. You have to accept that your first attempts are going to be quite rough compared to the finished works of great masters.

See, nobody understood how we were able to make a film like 'A Room With a View' so cheaply, for about $3.2 million, and have it look as good as it did.

Helena Bonham Carter was 19 when we made 'A Room with a View'. She came for the interview in these extraordinary boots and a black dress, and sat with her feet out in front of her.

Maurice' was a groundbreaking film. People didn't feel that then but looking back everyone says that.

In 'A Room With a View,' you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It's something the English don't apparently find troublesome.

When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.

I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that.

In India, I tried never to show enthusiasm for the things I wanted most, but instead to focus it falsely on something showy, ask the price of that and then make a disappointed face when told.

The conscious decision, early on, was that I was going to live in New York. That was it.

In October 1959, I could scarcely wait to get off the plane that had brought me to New Delhi so that I could go to the Indian Arts Palace in Connaught Place and begin buying miniature paintings.

I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.

I found in making and directing films that the less you have voiceover, the better it is.