I never went to drama school. I went straight into the theater. We had the most extraordinary voice teacher. I worked with her when I was starting out in my career. How to place my voice from a very relaxed position was all wonderfully reminiscent of going back to the basics. But I always like to do that with any role that I do, to dismantle it and put it all back together again.

I don't want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

Working in film, if you work with great directors, you learn that after every take you must let go. Sitting with my wife at the Academy Awards, we both let the moment just go.

The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.

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 honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

If one is going to offer children stories that underneath the story must be something that will inform, stimulate and guide, I love to be on board. I think anything that resonates with history, as does The Jungle Book and Watership Down, reflects patterns of behavior, power struggles, deprivation, migration, survival, joy, love, betrayal, and all of these things. It's tragic that children are encouraged to ignore history. We ignore history and any literature that is historically based in history. Even though both of those films involved animals, of course they reflect human behavior.