I don’t know if they ever really are. I mean, there are often works that you make for a particular moment and then maybe the next time you show them, you show them in a slightly different way so that they become more precise or more communicative. So they’re constantly evolving. Also, when you stick one work next to another work, suddenly it has a new resonance. You could almost argue that, in that new context, it’s a new work again. So I don’t know if you ever really finish anything.

I don’t dwell on things. When it rings and it feels good, I move on. I have so much to do, I have so many marks to hit, so many deadlines in front of me… People don’t realize the layers that are involved in one costume alone — and I do hundreds in one film. So I have to move in a space that’s in flow. When things feel like they are right and they are in the flow of the story and I can present them to the director and get feedback, I am really ready to move on. I could return to it and change it and change it again and go down that slippery slope, but it wouldn’t be prudent of me to keep changing things.

Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice with that. At this point, it is my 15th year of doing music, which is kind of crazy. I remember the first record I turned in, and I was asking myself all the time if it was done or whatever. It was great, but in retrospect, when I listen to things or look back, I’m like, “I should have done this differently.” Things like, “This is mixed weirdly.” Those are the types of mistakes you don’t notice in the moment, but that’s how it has to happen. You have to be a little bullheaded about it, a little stubborn and delusional, so the vision just sort of happens.

I think I’m more attuned to a popular… I grew up watching MTV and listening to three-minute songs, and I also don’t like concerts that are too long. A concert can be seven hours and not be too long, but sometimes a concert is forty-five minutes and it’s too long, and you’re uncomfortable, like, “It ended fifteen minutes ago, why do you keep making sound?” Or those situations where someone is playing and they’re fading out and you have this feeling of, “Yeah, it’s ending, yes, now, definitely,” and then they start again and you say, “No!” [ Laughs ] For me, moving over an hour or so, it goes into a different territory where I lose my sense of form. And then it becomes more like the chord in space. Installation format is where I would go after an hour.

The urge to be unpleasant to waitstaff in restaurants.

Sitting down to a leisurely conversation in an English tearoom with my wife, a friend, or even an interesting stranger. Good cake is essential.

Like Joel McCrea’s character at the end of the movie Ride the High Country. (He says something about “entering his house justified,” sits up to take a last look at the scenery, then rolls contentedly out of the frame.) Or like Bill Nighy’s character at the end of our film Living.

Actually, I had done what I thought was more or less a finished version of The Remains of the Day , but the very buttoned-up narrator, the butler — in that earlier version, he doesn’t quite come through confessing his true emotions. He maintains his front a little bit more effectively than he does in the final version. What made me change my mind was that, between that penultimate version and the final version I handed in, I listened to a song by Tom Waits — another great singer-songwriter, remarkable artist. And this is the power of that art form: it’s performance as well as the actual writing.

I’ve been emphasising here the small and the private, because essentially that’s what my work is about. One person writing in a quiet room, trying to connect with another person, reading in another quiet – or maybe not so quiet – room. Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?

The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn’t connect to any of the other characters in an interesting human relationship. And immediately, this next thought came regarding my own work: What if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?