I have a great relationship with animals and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world it's hugely different.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

It's not that you know when a relationship doesn't work and there are issues you have to somehow work it out if there are children involved.

How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig which my mother took me to see.

The most convincing argument against early parenthood is that you are in a relationship that is likely to fall apart before that child grows up.

It's about strengthening the relationship and the bond of parent to child.

I'm not a good father and they're not children any more the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and because of what the law was they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then only a few feet away in the cookbook section just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

I can't cultivate a relationship with my child if it's between takes. I tried that on a movie and realized 'This is not going to work.' It will work some of the year but not 12 months a year.