My life is really precious. I don't want to spend it watching ambient TV that just drifts through you. I've got better things to do.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

If you're going to lead people, you better know how to manipulate people, and you have to be pretty smart to be able to do that.

One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.

I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.

One of the things that I discovered in my research is that some serial killers build an ultimate reality around themselves that they believe in, 100%.

Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.