Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

It was mainly to do with Helen Hunt, to be honest. That's what drew my attention to it. I was interested in the fact that she was going to be directing. I'd never met her but she projects a degree of intelligence and it was convincing t me that she'd be able to handle this sort of material very well.

Looking in the mirror, staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

The failure so far of the governments of so many of the worlds most powerful countries in the face of such egregious unfairness ... to make the slightest progress on the issue of fair trade is hard to explain.

There's no point in it unless it's a story that you really want to tell. It's a nebulous job. Unless you're doing it well, you're not doing anything. And there are a few of those. It's perfectly possible to be a passenger on a film set because if somebody else has written it, you can make nothing of that role and that's exactly what bad directors do.

I don't know if there's a problem with original ideas... I think a healthy film industry should have a good supply of good, original writing.

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