Actors who perhaps are super-confident and have absolute belief in themselves I always admire, because I can't really be like that.

In England we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That's like a lot of the movie work I've done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.

I'm fully aware that I am a lucky, lucky man. This Oscar belongs to all of those people around the world battling ALS. It belongs to one exceptional family, and I will be it's custodian and I promise you that I will polish him, and wait on him hand and foot.

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.

If you've loved something and then in some ways you become a part of it, you just don't want to be the one that screws it up!

I always think of comedy as being spontaneous, and yet everything about filmmaking is not spontaneous.

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