I think the terrifying thing is you see all these people who go to the same cosmetic surgeon, and they end up, after a while, looking like everyone.

The notion of fate and destiny is a very Greek concept. Working in the theater you do think a lot about that, because as a storyteller you do think, 'At what point was this always going to happen and what part have I got a hand in being able to change things?'

If you age with somebody, you go through so many roles - you're lovers, friends, enemies, colleagues, strangers; you're brother and sister. That's what intimacy is, if you're with your soulmate.

With a role like Hedda Gabler, which is incredibly complicated, you often feel that you haven't even scratched the surface the first time around, so you relish the opportunity to do it again, particularly with an ensemble of actors and the company we assembled. But when you do that in films you somehow have to make some attempt to uncross people's arms and you have to justify why you're doing it.

Art civilizes us and it connects us and activates us. And so it's really important to connect with compassion, with stories about people who are different from us.

I discovered early on that some performers live their life in order to act, so all their relationships are simply an experience that they can feed back into their work. Which I find vampiric.

I could do a thousand films that are easy for me to do-that's if I don't fall in the next year, because everyone's about to fall. What's so funny is you look at all us young guys and we're already thinking, Well, I'm going to branch out into directing, and it's all going to be this and that.