I'm as voyeuristic and intrigued as the next person as to how celebrities live.

Making 'Birdsong,' on the one hand you have how prestigious it is and the reputation of the book, which is something that's an extraordinary piece of work. Sebastian Faulkes is a genius. So you feel that responsibility when you're portraying that character that he's imagined and millions of readers have pictured.

They're such hierarchical things, film sets, they're sort of mini societies. Often they're incredibly political places.

I always try to describe making movies like summer camp, or some holiday where you spend all day, every day with a new group of people whom you kind of love and then never see again.

The depiction of the exterior as opposed [to] what you're feeling inside is always so different that it's impossible to know what is right.

People ask, "Do you enjoy acting?" But you only have those specific few hours to do a scene, and then you drive home and wait for six months to find out how it went. You can't go back and put in a new idea. Filming is about continuing to be alert and to think, and I find it quite exhausting. Certainly I would say that fear is a part of that.

Up there on the screen, we can all fly. But down here on earth, we need to be each others wings.