Because I am an Englishman I spent most of my life in a state of embarrassment.
No matter how much technique you draw on or how much training you have, acting is a mystery.
If you’re playing someone who’s got marital problems, you have to play someone who’s trying not to have marital problems. So, you’ve got to get into the problem first.
If you’re playing someone who’s impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.
I can’t bring you absolute truth in the detailed factual sense. All I can do is bring you an interpretation as I understand it. That’s all you can ever get from an actor.
I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there’s a pattern there – that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.
Doing a job, or even watching a film, can make a difference to your life, but I don’t think it ever has an explosive impact where your life will never be the same again. It kind of seeps into your life, and perhaps realise you’re a little more vigilant about certain things than you might have been.
Directors don’t get to see other directors at work – they’re the only one on the set. I’ve met directors who’ve asked me what another filmmaker is like. So, there’s probably nobody better placed to make all the comparisons and to pick up stuff than an actor.
Just driving I just was in a car on flat ground and I couldn’t make it go. Having ticked driving and taken three driving lessons, I just was unable to produce any motion whatsoever under perfectly normal circumstances. I think we’ve all been busted on driving, and riding.
I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there’s nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: “Let’s get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film.”
The great thing about dealing with people about whom we have historical resources, is that if the writing needs work, there’s everywhere to go to enrich it.
So, if you haven’t picked up some tips during an apprenticeship like that, you shouldn’t be directing. It doesn’t mean you can do it, but it loads you up with information.
Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there’s not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they’re one of the boys, I think. I don’t want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it’s a fair observation.
And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There’s still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It’s quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.
Less racist now but it has been. I don’t think it’s been completely stamped out. There’s a class element to it. And who’s supposed to do what. You’re very unlikely to get a gay grip.
I’ve actually heard people protesting furiously about straight male costume people as well. It’s not universal and there are examples that break the mould all over the place. In my experience, it’s more prevalent in the UK than in America.
I do also think it eludes genre a bit – not in any groundbreaking way but you can’t quite call it a comedy and you can’t quite call it a romantic anything. It’s not quite a drama either really. But it has elements of all those things.
However good a communicator a director is, unless they’ve been actors, it’s just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who’s been an actor.
It didn’t have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it’s notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don’t think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I hear it.
But it’s interesting being directed by someone who is a very good actor. There’s nothing like it. It might sound like a territorial thing about what I do, but I don’t think you can understand what it is until you’ve done it. I know that to be a fact.
Nothing brings you closer together than blind terror.