'Sleepless' was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.
In Italy, on the breaking up of the Roman Empire, society might be said to be resolved into its original elements, - into hostile atoms, whose only movement was that of mutual repulsion.
If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.
I'm going to build an empire. I'm always writing for someone else. I want to be someone who has her fingerprints all over the pop charts.
Speaking personally as a filmmaker, I think encoded in Bond are a series of values about Britain, about the world, about masculinity, about power, about the empire that I don't share. Quite the reverse. Whereas in Bourne, I think encoded is much more scepticism. There's an us and a them, and Bourne is an us, whereas Bond is working for them.
The intellectual bourgeois of the old Empire - tepid and unimaginative, mentally slow, arrogant, and incorrectly trained - has proven his incapacity to be the bearer of German culture. His benumbed world is now toppled, its spirit is overthrown, and is in the midst of being recast into a new mold.
Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one.
