Do I have a muse? Well, I don’t know if this is an adequate answer, but I suppose my muse is the people of South Africa. I’ve often said that the little — or maybe the lot — I know about loving and hating was taught me by South Africa. Now that’s a big debt. When you owe that much to a situation that has shaped your conscience, your heart, your whole life, you’re profoundly indebted.

Yes, that’s right. I saw what I could succeed in. I never considered myself very bright, and I always thought of myself as mathematically mediocre. So I figured that probably, like your college runner who has difficulty breaking a ten-second hundred — well, breaking an 11-second, shall we say, 100-meter — realizes that their best shot is to rely less on strength and speed and more on self-discipline, planning, and long hard work. Yes. That’s the way I do science.

I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.

Moments of pure inspiration are glorious, but most of a writer’s life is, to adapt the old cliché, about perspiration rather than inspiration. Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.

But if I’ve come up with any kind of mantra for myself it’s to try and put myself into a state of imaginative play.

When Adèle walked down the road at the end of the film Blue Is The Warmest Colour.

A panic attack on stage during The Importance Of Being Earnest. Well, it felt like death.

The only experience I’ve had, in the early 90s I was working in the theatre and I went through a very bad period, 3 or 4 years, of dread inducing panic attacks before going out on stage and then I got an international film career and they sort of disappeared [laughter].

I wanted my children to grow up in Australia, and if I have anything to pass on to them as a parent as a mentor, it is my own experiences of having grown up there, and shaped a career there.

I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine.