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.

John Carpenter liked my work, and he needed some kind of name for the picture. The script was good, and I immediately liked John, so I did it.

I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.

Burleigh, absolutely; and a lot about Elizabeth. I mean I found when I play Henry V a lot of connections with the hidden history of the connection between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth.

At the age of four with paper hats and wooden swords we’re all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

I think that you always have something left, that you take something of the character with you.

I had bags of energy as a kid.

I’m not the kind of actor who goes into exhaustive research for each role.

It was actually the thing that I’ve put my heart into the most, in terms of research and everything, because I was a great admirer of Rimbaud’s work.

What can I tell you about things like Circus of Horrors except that I get killed by the bear?

Paris Hilton, that’s very interesting what she did. I’ve never done that. I haven’t really sort of ever got into that. As time passes, maybe I should record it and put it in a vault...

I can’t tell you too much about it because I’m not even meant to tell you that I’m in it. In fact, I might never work again now that I’ve been talking to you. I’m...

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the...

Monica Seles: I’d hate to be next door to her on her wedding night.

I was always insecure about the way I looked.

I want to direct but I think I’d be bloody awful and I don’t want to produce but I think I’d be a very good producer because if I believed in something I’d be able...

But Rangers don’t need to go there and win, they need to go there and get a point. I think the hardest thing about it is there will be no supporters. Playing in an empty...

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

I have no problem taking their money and dancing their dance. I’m doing that on this film, right now. They just haven’t realized it yet.

Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.

Doing that hunt scene was really quite demanding. I actually broke a rib during that scene. And then all the scenes after that became quite challenging, just breathing and laughing.

I’d like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there’s anything better than...

The French and the British are such good enemies that they can’t resist being friends.

An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment – his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego.

Television, although It’s in steep decline, still occasionally gives voices to people who don’t have voices.

Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn’t a really challenging part for me. I’m not critical of the film: I just don’t...

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...

Loomis has always felt himself responsible for the fact that he did not stop Michael when he first murdered his sister, and so he’s got that guilt to live with.

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

But I don’t sit down at dinner and have clever ideas.

The truth is an ambition which is beyond us.

I put quite a few trees in last autumn. A lot of silver birch and a couple of native trees – just generally doing gardening, putting plants in and hedges in. It takes quite a...

I had to help to coax the performances and I really enjoyed that extra responsibility.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don’t necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

Yeah, well that’s the best thing about it, I think, is knowing kids and kids getting mental when they know you’re in it. Any kid you meet and anyone I know tells the kid you’re...

All the real work is done in the rehearsal period.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.

I don’t know if it’s a romantic comedy but I’m in the beginning of the first of the season of “The West Wing.” We shot it last year. I don’t know. If anyone asks me...

So there’s a lot of people tied into believing that the traditional response to the authorship question. In terms of actors, some people get very angry about it.

I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds...

It’s an odd world.

I went being unemployed for three years to being the lead in a British feature in the days when we only made two a year, 1990. It was ridiculous really.

I earned the right to get in the team, and fought every game to be in it.

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...

I rather liked Death Line. All those zombies on the tube train thing was good fun, and it allowed me more of a comic turn than I am usually afforded.

However, I wasn’t very good at the sciences, or didn’t have a lot of help in the sciences or something but certainly didn’t set science for my A level. And when I came to take...

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That’s why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the ‘good guy’ or the ‘bad guy,’ because I think...

The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the...

As for being a General, well, at the age of four with paper hates and wooden swords, we’re all Generals. Only some of us never grow out of it.

I don’t know what else I could do but pretend to be an actor.