The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.

The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art.

I have loved movies as the number one thing in my life so long that I can't ever remember a time when I didn't.