No, we didn’t shoot… in the ones that I did there were hardly any sex… there were suggestions of sex scenes but we never actually shot a sex scene as such.

The best actors instinctively feel out what the other actors need, and they just accommodate it.

If the arts are held up solely as a means of social insight, fantasy is denied the chance to be commonplace and reality the chance to be exotic.

We worked solidly for a long time together. George Marriott Edgar and myself.

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer...

Balance is the enemy of art.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story… I don’t if anybody knows what it is but it was about… in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened...

My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.

In the Confessions series I don’t remember any sex scenes as such. Yes, there were certain uncovers that went on, but no sex as such.

Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn’t making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I’d better do some writing.

I’m first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

Yes, The Persuaders, that was great fun because one of my favourite actors is Roger Moore.

At those times I got into… I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.

I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That’s why I like pictures.

And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That’s how he saw Bond.

Now, I’ll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn’t get anybody to touch it, to publish it – he couldn’t...

Don’t make jokes about food.

And then she finally said yes. And we have been married, I want you to know, for 51 years.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man’s Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director’s job to make it appear real… an audience should not be conscious of technique.

I don’t know how we had about eighteen international stars in it, all playing James Bond.

I’ve just begun to dare to think I perhaps am a bit of an artist.

I had a terrible job letting me do anything that wasn’t comedy.

I rather like mysteries. But I do dislike muddles.

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill… as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and...

I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn’t really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.

I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made… I made a...

I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They’re so earnest about it. But that’s...

I’d always wanted to do something about the Second World War, but I didn’t want to do another combat film, whether it was air, land, or sea.