I sort of leave the character at the end of the day. I don’t carry anything around with me – no excess baggage or unnecessary thoughts. I think it’s too exhausting to do that. To...

I wasn’t always such a great fan of Shakespeare, mind you. I can guess we all at one time had it rammed down our necks at school, which tends to take the edge off it.

The person who gives you your first job is so important in any industry.

I don’t think Alfonso was a big expert on Potter either. He was feeling his way through it more than I was.

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

The idea of dying and coming back is what makes the Halloween films work.

No, I don’t believe in hard work. If something is hard, leave it. Let it come to you. Let it happen.

But to me I find Francis Bacon the most likely candidate to be the author.

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn’t amount to much.

I know exactly where I’ve come from, I know exactly who my mum and dad are.

I just like to keep challenging myself, keep it varied. It’s a craft, and I’m constantly trying to learn and get better at it.

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.

At this point in my career, it doesn’t bother me much that I’m probably hopelessly typecast. I like to work, and horror films definitely keep me working.

Actors often behave like children, and so we’re taken for children. I want to be grown up.

It’s just really, really beautiful. Each scene is one long 15 minute take without cutting. My scene is with Robin Wright-Penn so I’m pretty excited about that.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it’s true, it’s very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say… it would...

the social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.

It can be very difficult to trace your birth parents.

I work hard. I work 80-90 hours a week in part-time football.

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 was offered a choice of a flat salary up front or a percentage of the film’s future earnings. I took the up front money. Nobody could have figured what Halloween would ultimately become.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

When I go to a movie, I’m always thrilled if I’ve seen an actor do something and I didn’t realize until the end of the movie that that was that person. I love that.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

The film is about Joe discovering who his mother and father are and his relationship with them, and the identity crisis he goes through once he finds out who his parents are.

Twelve years on sets watching directors, I’ve taken a bit from everybody and rejected a lot.

Well I am afraid that I am going to die, because I have just put a down payment on a house.

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

The play is on top of me all the time, and I am constantly thinking about it. Even when I leave the theatre, I’ll mumble the lines to myself or think about the way the...

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

A diplomat these days in nothing, but a head waiter who is allowed to sit down occasionally.

I love Dead Ringers. A democratic set, the work was taken seriously.

The sexiest part of the body is the eyes. That’s what I believe.

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

Continental directors, as opposed to British and American, tend to be somewhat high-handed in their approach.

It’s always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

It’s very likely that graduates, current employees and retirees have some wonderful pieces of Deer Park history in their closets or garages.

You know, I don’t think you need to be educated to be a great actor.

I’m convinced there’s a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

It must be heartbreaking for a filmmaker to actually start something like that. And then to have some terrible, terrible weather problems.

I would run through brick walls for Spurs.

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’m hardly physically right for the hero parts, now am I?

I envy children who know that they’re going to become doctors, know they’re going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that’s what I try...

A lot of people are going to hate me for saying this, but one of my least favorite kinds of music, or the kind of music that I feel I’ve so got out of my...

Sex is a conversation carried out by other means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems of bed are solved.

Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.