Quotes from David Farr

You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!

The 'Ramayana' explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.

As a director, I start with the visual.

Most Robin Hood stories are not very exciting. There are not a lot of surprises.

Perhaps I'm temperamentally driven to see things from the point of view of the attacked rather than the attacker.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story.

The forest has always been a place, in fairy tales and in Shakespeare, where you go and discover who you are. You get stripped of everything you thought you were, some type of ordeal takes place, and you come out stronger.

Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.

We don't live in vacuums; we do care about the world, and we do want to believe our country is doing the right thing on our behalf.

I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that's why we love it.

I can only be instinctive in my reaction to Shakespeare.

'Hamlet' is a play of many strange parts, with ghosts and players, politicians and clowns.

The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.

The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.

'Fall Of A City' aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.

I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.

I don't like selling myself. It's a sort of shy arrogance.

We go into nature to transform.

'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.

Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.

In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.