[on The English Patient (1996)] I think the film is quite cruel actually and quite austere; it carries this lava of emotion on quite a formal surface. And one of the reasons why in my life I have loved Bach so much is because I think he too has this combination of an extremely formal structure and apparent austere sound, but underneath there's this emotion boiling away, and I think that one of the purposes of fiction is to exercise the emotional muscle - that's what we go for, we go to think and to feel and I think that feeling somehow in England is at a premium, that people are embarrassed to feel in public, whereas I think that's the luxury of fiction - you can inhabit areas of existence which are not your own but which afford you the possibility of being able to go to places naked really, and I feel my own nakedness in the work that I'm doing; in fact I never watch anything I've been associated with after I've done it because I feel like I'm standing there for everybody to look at, so I haven't seen The English Patient since I finished it. [1997]
