[ Chadwick Boseman] was not a baseball player. He spent, I don't know, countless hours, many months, working two sessions a day with professional pro coaches to develop the baseball skills that he needed.

I think you have to be very careful with effects that they don't overpower the story with the visual element.

An icon means nothing to me. I don't understand what it means to anybody actually. It seems like a word of convenience. It seems to attend to the huge success of certain kinds of movies that I did, but there's no personal utility in being an icon. I don't know what an icon does, except stand in a corner quietly accepting everyone's attention. I like to work, so there's no utility in being an icon.

I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.

I am not the first man who wanted to make changes in his life at 60 and I won't be the last. It is just that others can do it with anonymity.

What's important is to be able to see yourself, I think, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

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.