Mike Figgis

'I made a decision a couple years ago that I'd start inventing my own golden rules. One is that all film is science fiction, all film is black comedy, and character is plot. And the over-emphasis on plot is a waste of time. Because at the end of the day, people don't really give a fuck about plot. They want it to work, they want to believe that it's believable, but outside of that, what they really want to identify with is character. And they enjoy seeing character development, and a really great actor portraying a really great character can mesmerize an audience for an entire movie, with virtually very little happening: could be just going fishing, telling a few stories, that's what we love. '

On writing Time Code

"So back on that train -- I'm stuck on this train and I love trains; they're very creative. I had abandoned my laptop some months earlier, because I got so pissed off at it, crashing and running out of batteries at times of intellectual orgasm. So I had gone back to my favorite system of fountain pen and huge notebooks. And so I started using this notebook and it's all there on about 4 pages on this train journey -- the entire story structure, what kinds of notation to write the script and so on. "

More from this interview here. I was googling to try and find out more about the Digital Film-Making book he's just written when I came across this.