I hate people eating on film. I hate it even worse on the radio, when people eat on the radio. I just can't stand it.

I prefer the finesse of French humour. English humour is more scathing, more cruel, as illustrated by Monty Python and Little Britain.

What you want is a comfortable environment that you feel you can invent in. Because film is such a lumbering, technical, huge, great Neanderthal thing, it's hard to create that little space of peace, and calm, and creativity, and ease. That's what you want the director to create for you, so that when you walk on the set, you forget all of that, and the fact that it's costing gazillions of dollars a second.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

Any role that's proactive is a great role, and action roles are by their very nature proactive. You get to do stuff. I hate sitting in a corner - I'd much prefer an action role in a popcorn movie rather than pining in a corner not doing anything.