[1] In the 1990s and 2000s, Cousins interviewed directors, producers, and actors including Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, Sean Connery, Brian De Palma, Steve Martin, Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Moreau, Terence Stamp, Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh and Rod Steiger.

TCM received a 2013 Peabody Award "for its inclusive, uniquely annotated survey of world cinema history".

a self-photographed diary of his three-day walk around Mexico City, accompanied by his imagined conversation with a photo of Sergei Eisenstein and described as "fatuous" by film bible Variety.

[12] Another low-budget, quickly-produced documentary, Here Be Dragons, covers a short film-watching trip he made to Albania and was also poorly received as indulgent and "random".

[14] Life May Be was a collaboration with Iranian director and actor Mania Akbari, again making use of Cousins' familiar structural devices of letters, travel imagery, and voiceover commentary, judged "self-advertisement".

[21] He was working on a three-hour addendum to The Story of Film, on the subject of documentaries, entitled Dear John Grierson.

Together with Antonia Bird, Robert Carlyle, and Irvine Welsh, Cousins is a director of the production company 4Way Pictures.

[35] Born in Coventry, England,[36] Cousins was raised in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland (where he attended St Louis Grammar School), and graduated in film, television and art at the University of Stirling.