Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.

It can be a bit annoying if another actor is trying to talk to the director and the wife is sitting on his lap.

That's the process of making the film and it isn't until the world puts their eyes to it that you find out if it's creating any kind of connection at all. But every single film at some stage of the film I think, "I wonder what this is going to be?"

Myself and Yorgos Lanthimos, we spoke a little bit and I was at a certain body weight that I was closer to making a statement or defining the character physically by losing weight. There was no justification for him to be emaciated, but I thought, say I was 165, I thought what if I went down to 155 and have him rail-thin? And Yorgos was like, "Well, if he's very thin I think maybe it will speak to some kind of psychological trouble that we want to stay away from," and I was like, "F - -, you're right."

Pain seems to be easier, or melancholy seems to be easier to portray in a character. I don't know if that's because I'm a human being or because I'm an Irishman or both.

As much as "The Lobster" feels like a world we recognize but not the world we live in, it's all drawn in an allegorical way from all the systems that exist.

I'm enjoying [my career]. If anything I'm aware that the pressure of the first, I suppose, six or seven years I was in America - I mean that energy of having such a rapid and ascending celebrity - it's not there anymore. It's the end of that chapter and now I'm just enjoying the work probably more than I ever have and yet I'm simultaneously less attached to it I think, which is kind of a strange state of grace to be in.