I was at art school that had quite a celebrated film course as well. I tried for that film course when I was 18, but they said I was too young. I tried this audio and visual design course instead. Two years later, I reapplied for that higher course, but they said I was still too young and to try in five years.

It's interesting that some people reading the comics see Scott Pilgrim as a blank slate in that they like to imagine themselves as Scott Pilgrim, so it's interesting that there are two kind of schools of thought about the character. One is, like, Scott Pilgrim is awesome. The second is Scott Pilgrim believes himself to be awesome.

What 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' and 'World's End' do is smuggle a different movie under the guise of a zombie movie or a cop or alien invasion movie. Even though they all have action and carnage, they are really films about growing up and taking responsibility.

Some actors don't even read the stage directions at all.

There are plenty of movies that you need to chew on a bit. Movies that you return to and see something different in the second time around.

I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make.

I found, after the experience of making 'Shaun Of The Dead' and then returning to the blank page - because 'Shaun Of The Dead' was the first screenplay I ever wrote properly - the experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful.

We need to make more original movies, and audiences would do well to support original movies for the future of the medium.

When I was a kid, I just figured we'd be living on the moon by the year 2000.

I grew up on Marvel and, like, '2000 AD.'

Wes Anderson deserves an award for sheer persistence of vision.

Tony Scott, Walter Hill, Michael Mann - I'm a big action fan, full stop. And even though Michael Mann is the more celebrated film-maker than Tony Scott, I love them both in different ways.

The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.

'The Driver' wasn't commercially successful at the time, but when I was a teenager, I had no knowledge of that.

I am always watching old films and trying to fill gaps in my knowledge.

When you're struggling to get a feature film off the ground, there's no big overarching tenure plan or anything like that.

In a lot of action films, a lot of guys are driving muscle cars or vintage cars, whereas in reality, a lot of getaway drivers would actually choose, like, commuter cars and find a way to blend into freeway traffic as quickly as possible.

I grew up on 'Battle of the Planets.'

Television was essentially my college.

When I was younger, I used to love Tim Burton's 'Batman.' I was, like, 15, and even then, I was aware, 'This is really the Joker's film.' It's like, the Joker just takes over, and Batman, you really don't learn too much about him.

For 120 minutes, 'Birdman' floats from comedy to surrealism to high drama to quiet brilliance. I felt so inspired by watching this movie. It reaches for the sky and never comes back down to earth.

If you ever watch police chases on, like, helicopter cams, they very quickly become nightmarish when you start to see the police coming in from the edge of the frame. I always find that terrifying.

The man-child in American comedies is always glorified; they never really show the darker side.

All of my films have been very dialogue-heavy, and that's great. It always makes it more of a challenge to market in other countries.

One of the reasons for me that there's no 'Spaced 3' is that I don't think you can pretend to be 26 for ever.

I love the Zucker brothers' films - 'Airplane!,' 'Top Secret' and 'Police Squad!' - are my formative experiences.

When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'

We got offers to make sequels to both 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' and they never really interested us because we like having these endings where it seems very final but could hint at some kind of future adventure that you'll never see.

I just remember watching 'Brass Eye' and being so utterly blown away by the scope of it and how much it managed to cram into an episode.

I'd rather try and cram in another two gags than leave a pause to say, 'Hey, wasn't that bit funny?'

Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.

When I did 'Hot Fuzz,' I tried to get Barbara Steele in the movie, but I was told she had retired.

Car chases are as painstaking to make as they are fun to watch. They take a lot of time, and you have to keep the energy up.

The first TV show I worked on was with the guys from 'Little Britian,' Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who did a show in 1995 I directed, 'Mash and Peas.'

I loved the idea of somebody literally fighting for love.

I guess a lot of comic-book adaptations strive for realism. Christopher Nolan is making Batman seem very real and very serious.

I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.

If you go back to your home town or you're reunited with school friends, its always slightly bittersweet because as much as there's nice things in terms of seeing them again, the town has changed without you, and you're no longer a part of it.

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

I think you write the film that you want to see, and you try and do it honestly, and you can't control people's responses, really.

'RoboCop,' when that came out, was like the best comic book movie ever, and it's not based on a comic book.

When you're doing a car chase movie, you're sitting in car waiting for places or grips or stuff for quite a while.

I was never a DC kid - I went through a phase from, like, 11 to 17 where I would try to buy as many Marvel titles as possible. And '2000 AD' was kind of the sort of sci-fi/punk of British comics.

Sometimes, some things have to settle, and you have to think about the intention of it.

My favorite film of all time is 'Raising Arizona.' I watched it again as soon as it was over. I had it on VHS, rented it, and I watched it and said, 'I want to watch that again, right now.' I think I did the same with something like 'Goodfellas,' which is a completely different genre.

If you're on a road trip, you need driving music.

You cannot put 50 years of the Marvel universe into a movie. It's impossible.

I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films.

I'd like to do some things over again. I never want to repeat anything that went well, though - I just want to do better at slightly different things.