If you're playing someone who's impeded by fear, or shyness, or has whatever dysfunction your character might have, you have to achieve the dysfunction first, imaginatively, in order to play someone who is trying to negotiate their way out of it.

My singing voice is somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem.

I never saw myself as Mr. Ugly, but I'm not that handsome. I can sort of be made to look quite a lot better or quite a lot worse.

To work effectively in a film, you have to repeat and work consistently. Basically, you shoot a big master then you do close-ups. You're supposed to be in the same moment, the same 30-second moment, for a day.

So, if you haven't picked up some tips during an apprenticeship like that, you shouldn't be directing. It doesn't mean you can do it, but it loads you up with information.

However good a communicator a director is, unless they've been actors, it's just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who's been an actor.

I think it helps to get a film made because people who put money in are nervous. They like to have something recognisable enough to make them secure that there's a pattern there - that someone else put their money into something like this and made it back.