Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn’t going to work.
In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn’t care what the audience think of you. That’s not why you are there. You mustn’t care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.
I’m convinced that had I not changed my name, I don’t think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.
We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they’re good actors.
There’s so much crap talked about acting.
I never read anything in print about me. It started with not reading reviews and with the greatest respect to my publicist here, I never read interviews. I was there when I gave them. I never read reviews. I was there when I did the jobs – so I’m totally immune. I live in a bubble.
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.
I didn’t go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey.
I want to play a man in uniform. I’ve got tremendous respect for that life that they lead. We know so little about it. It’s never discussed or talked about, when they come back from battle. I want to examine the choices that have to be made in some terrible times. I’ll get to wear a uniform.
There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.
The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.
John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.
I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don’t understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.
The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!
I hope I’m able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I’m reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That’s what I’d like to do.
It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.
What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.
Well, it’s wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.