As a director, I start with the visual.

'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.

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

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.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

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

We go into nature to transform.

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

The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.

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.

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.

The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.

The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.

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.

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

'Fall Of A City' aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.

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

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

There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.