What drew you to Anne Michaels' novel in the first place?

I think what is great about it is that you really feel deeply moved when you read it. It's deeply sad but it's also full of love for people. I think that Anne has a great deal of compassion for people and she details instances of great general feelings between people, like love, sacrifice and those things are very, very moving. So when I read it, the poetry of it was immediately striking.

Your father is a Polish immigrant and a survivor of the Holocaust. Do you think that part of your past was required for you to remain true to the story?

I don't know that it's required for you to have an experience that's close to something that you are adapting, but it certainly doesn't hurt. I think that I do have a very intimate perspective of it and I did bring a lot of myself to the material as well. I wouldn't say that it's essential but I think that I have a respect for the subject and a sense of responsibility to treat it truthfully that someone else might not have.

Did you feel intimidated by your source material when adapting the book for the film?

Well, Anne is just a brilliant writer so of course meeting someone whose work you admire so greatly is really intimidating. The great thing about Anne is that she's so disarming - she's so down to earth and lovely and engaging that your intimidation goes away fairly quickly. Although working on the movie, as time went on she would come by and I would think, "Can I do justice to the material?" But I did feel that we did have a kinship of purpose; we had a personal sympathy and we both wanted the same thing out of the movie. We were at least on the same page and my intentions were very honourable towards the material.

In the past you've said that, "The whole process of writing and rewriting is about making sub-textual what was originally on the surface." What did you highlight and what did you obfuscate in this case?

There are a lot of alterations you have to make as you're adapting from one medium to another, but in the end if you're faithful to the tone and the intention of the book, it almost doesn't matter what you change.

Did you find that you had to direct the little boy, Robbie Kay, a lot?

The interesting thing about Robbie is that he doesn't have a lot of experience as an actor, but he has an amazing intuitive ability to capture a moment. He has an incredibly expressive face and he has soul, and that is the one thing that you can't manufacture. Many child actors have a surface charm or they are technically adept but you can't see into their soul. And Robbie, you just look into those eyes and you feel a deep old soul. So I did have to do a lot of work with Robbie on a purely technical level because he did have to learn how to become an actor, but what he did have from the get-go was an ability to be still and to be truthful and honest.

The relationship between Robbie and actor Rade Serbedzija seemed so real. Why do you think it was that their characters meshed so well together?

I think that Anne wrote a beautiful relationship between a very generous, self-sacrificing man and a traumatized child - it's such a deep story and it's such a beautiful relationship. Also, Rade has children and he's a fantastic father. Rade just has a huge capacity for love, he loves children, he's warm and open and I think he really embraced Robbie and knew his relationship with Robbie was very important to develop for the movie for purely human reasons.

I remember one day Rade came up to me and he was like, "Hey, you gotta see this!" And he just threw Robbie over his shoulder. There's a scene in the movie where after he chases Jacob after they have had a misunderstanding, Jacob runs away and he just throws him over his shoulder. Rade was so excited because he really wanted to show the natural ease and intimacy that an adult can have with a child. I love Rade for that, for just always trying to make it intimate and real and authentic.

The book 'Fugitive Pieces' has been described as being layered with metaphors. How do you transplant such literary qualities onto a visual medium?

There are little things in the film like the oranges and tea with lemon or the power of a photograph, certain images that gain a certain amount of resonance through the storytelling that have a poetic quality to them - so that's one way. Another way is by using the actual words of the novel in the movie. It was my intention at the very beginning was that there be a voice over that would be used sparingly but effectively throughout the whole film. I actually used some of Anne's poetry that is not in the novel that she had published separately.

You have directed a series of television shows like 'Six Feet Under' and 'Rome.' What do you think it is about your directorial style that works so well on the small screen?

The shows that I've done have all been really strong, conceptual shows. They've all had strong visual looks and very rich material. I think that suits me because I like things that are layered and detailed and complicated. I think all the shows I've done are different from each other but they all have genre defying, interesting aesthetics and themes that all fit together.

With files from Chloe Tejada.