Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
For British cinema to survive, you really need a British film culture, and it's got to start down there, with young kids watching films in the cinema - so they can be transported to a different world.
Actually I don't watch a lot of films but when I do, I like experimental, avant garde, European and world cinema. That is the language of cinema I am drawn towards. I don't watch much Hollywood or Bollywood.
I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.
I am the Olympic, World, Commonwealth, and European champion now, and I hope that's enough for people to accept that I am a half-decent British athlete.
I actually really love British and European cinema, but you have to go where the work is, and for me, it's in America.
It makes me very, very happy to get someone a world title shot, which I've done with a few fighters, or a European title shot or a British title, and I see them lift that belt above their waist and they come to me and say 'Thanks Ricky. I've just paid my mortgage off with that.' That's what its all about.
I got a chance to work with so many stalwarts from British cinema. Judi Dench, of course, who is a legend. Then there was my director Stephen Frears. He is the man who made some of British cinema's salient trendsetters.
After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.
My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish.
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
The Financial Times is pro-British membership of the European Union. We have taken that position for decades. But we are not starry-eyed about the European Union. And we do not believe and have not believed for at least 10 years that Britain should be part of the euro.
I think Britain's economy has done extremely well from having the influx of talented people from around the world and from having an influx of people from the rest of the European Union. It's both evidence of how strong the British economy was - that's what drew people in - but it's also part of what's making the British economy work.
In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.
It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.