The trick of this thing and the beauty of this thing is that it's a cowboy movie first and then stuff happens. Even after stuff happens it doesn't change - it hasn't suddenly changed into another kind of movie. It's still a cowboy movie. And that's what's incredible about it because nobody has done that before, that's new territory.

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Directing is too hard, it takes too much time, and it doesn't pay very well.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

As a matter of fact, that was a bit of a problem for me at the beginning of my career - the problem of identification. In The Conversation I played a character who was gay, so nobody recognised me from American Graffiti. When I did Apocalypse Now, after Star Wars, I played an intelligence officer of the American army. George Lucas saw the footage I had done and didn't recognise me until halfway through the scene.

You get a sense of reference there. You feel part of something that's got order and balance and harmony to it. All the distraction and noise, all the confusion of misplaced, misdirected energy just don't happen there.

Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures].