There are so many locations in this film. Seventeen years I've been looking for these locations. It's a location scout's nightmare - or perhaps their dream. There was someone on the internet who wrote, "I would give my left nut to be Tarsem's location scout!" If you give it time you realise that all of these green screen shots or effects shots you do date very, very quickly. When you go ten years or fifteen years down the line, no matter how good it is everything will look like a bad videogame. Location shooting, I can guarantee you, it was never hip, but it will never date. If you buy it now you will love it more twenty five years from now and it's because everything is on location.

The trouble when you use beautiful images is that people don't realise you can sometimes be making a joke. They don't realise that it may look beautiful but it's idiosyncratic. That's a difficult one to tell people, and this is one of the more idiosyncratic moments in the film. People don't know if they're supposed to laugh. In fact for the whole film you're seducing people to think it's funny so that by the end bit, as soon as you're ready to laugh at it, it gets dark, so they don't know if they should be crying. Either you embrace it or you go, "Fuck off!"

But I'm saying that from the very beginning the storyteller is in front of you and he's trying to show you his manipulation. That's how I'm taking the license and I'm showing it to you through him. It's not passion or anything, it's manipulation and that's how pictures do it to you. And sometimes people are - correctly - offended by it.

These are all extras that he's standing on which we picked up there. The temperature here is 49 degrees centigrade while raining, so you can imagine how hot this is. It was cheaper for them to get extras to wear this horrendous Nuagahyde Leather thing - that was painted and smelling of toxic stuff - and make them still than it was to use dummies!