Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.

I'm not painting myself as a down-home, modest guy.

I'll wait to see what the film [The Lobster] is, but it's set in a contemporary world, in America, there are hospitals and diners, parks, things that we will recognize and experienced ourselves but yet there's this similar kind of uneasiness through all the interactions and all the things that take place. It was unnerving reading the script. I kind of felt nauseous after reading it.

It as an argument between the world of emotion versus the world of the intellect. It's the idea that you can suppress a person's mind and a person's experiences, mentally, psychologically and intellectually, but you can't completely quiet them to the point of dormancy and the emotionally life a person. You still have the heart and what the heart remembers and what the heart experiences. And even that isn't important that that comes across.

If you do a fifteen hour day on a film, there's a lot of time standing around but at the end of that, you want to go home to your hotel room and have a bite to eat, watch a movie and go to bed.

Making a film, you're in a really dark tunnel and the only kind of illumination is the shared experience you're having with your fellow cast and director.

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.