But you see, I have played more good guys than I have played villains.

Wanting to be a good actor is not good enough. You must want to be a great actor. You just have to have that.

Any actor who tells you that they have become the people they play, unless they’re clearly diagnosed as a schizophrenic, is bullshitting you.

I have three kids who like Harry Potter so I was sort of aware of it. You can’t really move from it: it’s on buses, in stores, it’s everywhere. One of my kids has read...

Well, I needed the work – that’s the honest answer. I haven’t worked for a while, a couple of years. So I thought it would be nice to get back to work and earn some...

Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.

I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.

When I directed, it was in a bubble, a creative bubble and I was very spoilt there. I’d like to do it again but it would have to be under my method.

By the way, the Harry Potter series is literature, in spite of what some people might say. The way J.K. Rowling worked that world out is quite something.

If one could have a wish, or an alternative life, I would’ve liked to have been John Lennon.

Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where...

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so...

We’re given a code to live our lives by. We don’t always follow it, but it’s still there.

I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy – that is a miracle in itself.

It’s becoming increasingly harder and harder; there’s no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren’t any, they don’t exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget...

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles’ faces on it. It would be a collector’s item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes...

I hadn’t worked for a couple of years so I thought it would be nice to earn some money and pay the bills.

What’s fascinating is that when you write a script, it’s almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you’re not always sure what. Then when you get on the...

People imagine that actors are being offered everything and you are not. So things come in and sometimes there are things that I want and can’t get a meeting on, or go to a different...

I wasn’t ever a huge fan of comics. Just not one of those kids, you know?

To be able to do this job in the first place you’ve got to have a bit of an ego.

Shakespeare doesn’t really write subtext, you play the subtext.

Interesting things come your way but as you get older, your lifestyle changes. I don’t want to travel; I don’t want to be in a hotel room away from my family.

To be honest, I’m a little tired of playing bad guys. I long to do a comedy. But it was fun knocking Indiana Jones around.

So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is...

My passion and energy get mistaken for anger.

The film follows very much in the tradition of social realism, because I wanted to see a subject like this tackled with honesty.