I find sometimes that if you do too many takes, it starts to become meaningless to me. It is hard to sustain it for me. I don't want to do too many.

I don't think you necessarily identify and believe in the motifs of the character, but you have to want to play it and want to commit to the lines.

I couldn't bear a marriage in which one partner hinges on the other.

There's something to play if there's conflict going on. Whatever that conflict is, that's where drama is; if the character is grappling with something you've got something to play, there's layers to it.

I'm English and I'm used to coming from a world of period dramas, where there's a very polite restraint to everything. Everybody's sort of sitting in drawing rooms.

The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

A huge part of acting in movies is appetite. You do your best work when you've got a lot of appetite and you really want to embrace something. When you get tired, you don't have that hunger.