Michael Winterbottom quotes:

When you start being enthusiastic about whatever it is you like, that is the golden age for you.

When people approach me about my films it is usually to tell me how much they hate them.

There's still a 1950s view of cinema, that there's one audience and they all want to see the same thing.

If you make a film set in London or in Pakistan or wherever, the thing that interests me is the relationships between individuals - individuals and society, individuals and their family, their girlfriend or boyfriend, it's all the same idea.

I still enjoy watching films more than making them.

If you do a story about a British journalist rescuing a child from Sarajevo, then Sarajevo just becomes an exotic location, and the story's about this British journalist.

I prefer to take actors and put them in real settings and real locations and real situations rather than create artificial locations that serve the characters. It's just much easier when you are walking down the street with your actors to do that in a real street that's still open with people on it, rather than to close it off and bring in extras.

I prefer to watch people.

A lot of the aspects of the world of the film are amalgams of things that already exist.

I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting.

I think it would be impossible if you had a name like mine not to get a little flack for it.

I'm a fan of music from all over the world.