I had never even thought about doing something that I'd never done before or proving anything.

You have to remember that baseball really was the American pastime in the Forties, not football, basketball or any other sport.

The loss of anonymity is something that nobody can prepare you for. When it happened, I recognized that I'd lost one of the most valuable things in life. To this day, I'm not all that happy about it

The focus and the concentration and the attention to detail that flying takes is a kind of meditation. I find it restful and engaging, and other things slip away.

With the CGI, suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

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