Tom [Courtenay] and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that's how it started. It's a wonderful documentary. It's called Tosca's Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians - because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor - could live there.

I walked out of the theater and started crying. My wife asked me, 'Why are you crying?' I said, 'Because I can't do that.' I didn't know how he did it. I've never seen anything like that. It's like this feat, this Rodin sculpture to me. It's like hearing an opera singer and the tears go down your face because it's not human what they're doing. It's like sounds of heaven.

A "take" is an opportunity to fail ... and we think that we have to get it right all the time.

What makes divorce happen is that you can't be in the same space any more, for whatever reason - but the love stays. And that's the killer. That's where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from.

Euthanasia is legal in Hollywood. They just kill the film if it doesn't succeed immediately.

You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.