My ambition from the very beginning was to make a good part for myself, something differently to what lately I've been doing.

A bad guy in a movie has a lot of latitude for acting. He can walk up the wall, crawl across the ceiling, go piss in the corner and everybody will say, "Fantastic!" But somebody's going to have to catch that sucker. Somebody's going to have to play the guy who gets him in the end. And that's a better part.

It's a wonderful opportunity to be part of a child's growing up, which is always an endless springtime. You see the blossoming and the growing and the nurturing and the payoff.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

I was one of the few people who thought Star Wars was going to work, and I hadn't even seen any special effects.

Irish as a person but I feel Jewish as an actor.

The capacity to create [visual] effects in the computer has made the job easier, but it has also introduced the complexity that you can with a few more keystrokes generate such a busy canvas that the eye doesn't know where to go. You lose human scale on an event and you're just wowed by the kinetics and the visualization. But, often in those cases I feel you lose touch with the human characters and what it is that they would feel and how they might feel, and that's still the most important part.