There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.

If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.

The West has always been the epicentre of possibility. One of the ways we forge against mortality is to head west. It's to do with catching the sun before it slips behind the horizon.

Leaving a role is a terrible sadness. The last day of the shooting is surreal. Your soul, your body and your mind are not ready at all to see the end of this experience. In the following months after a film shoot, one feels a deep sense of void.

Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished