As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life.

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.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

My wife and I have now founded Lavender Pictures. If one has one's own company, there are very few surprises, but there's still the actual thrill of trying to get these projects off the ground. We're meeting with some measure of success. Always, now and at any stage of my career, I'm open to ambush, but there have been the most extraordinary set of coincidences, which continues through my journey, and I find it thrilling. Often, out of left field and quite randomly, comes a project and I think, "My god, there you are!" It's quite beautiful, really.

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.

I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.