According to Egyptian regulations, the chairman of the department, the dean of the faculty of sciences, the president of Alexandria University, and the minister of higher education, they all have to sign off.

Logistically, technically, shooting at 48 frames per second, working in 3D – those were all huge challenges. The biggest lessons were more logistical – decision making on a day to day level. It was a very complex schedule, always shifting. So, those were huge challenges. Stamina-wise, there were many, many challenges.

For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.

The hard part was getting around this, this was a religion among physicists, and in fact even in the Bohr-Einstein debates, and with Schrödinger also, the universal religion was quantum mechanics makes correct predictions, period, no, off the table. What Bell's theorem and in particular our version of it, the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt experimental prediction, showed that either that had to be wrong, nor Einstein's whole legacy had to be wrong. I think at the time people who were critical of doing the experiment didn't realise really what was at stake, that it was that cut and dried between two religious icons, if you will, the field of physics. Since I kind of was the inventor of the CHSH inequality and the CH inequality and all that, I knew exactly what it was all about. But it took a long time for that to filter in.

I didn’t think anything actually [before],” he nods. “And now I ask many questions. Because I don’t know what I will do in such a situation.

I think they have no duty. But we do have the opportunity, not to change the world, but to make people think differently.

No. You don't have to have rules. If you have rules—you know in cinema you have to be very pragmatic.

But I don’t want to repeat myself. And I realised that in America, the producer is the master of the film and the director is just a technician.

Truffaut, Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, they were the great directors of the Nouvelle Vague. They found the freedom to make exactly the films they wanted. Chabrol was important because he was able to make very strong portraits of women and very complex portraits of women. He was very clever and he had a lot of joy and pleasure. He didn’t have some big theories about his work, he just enjoyed making films. I try to work like that.

The truth is that the actresses supposedly have to get operated on and go through cosmetic surgery.