I think I'd rather do [acting] in the real place. It requires different things, working with green screen, but its an imaginative exercise anyway, the whole business of acting, so it just gives you a bit more to feed the imagination. Unless it's really silly, just two of you stuck in a space with nothing but green screen that's got to be pretty difficult.

You collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

I think an actor is very like a sportsman. You have periods where you're in terrific form. Everything you touch seems to work, and come right. And other times, when you're working really hard, it's okay, but it isn't scintillating.

By the very nature of being a clergyman's son, people tend to put you slightly apart, which is - you tend to live a life, at some stages, as being - people being suspicious of you and puts you rather on a - I don't mean lonely, particularly. But it does tend to put you apart.

A very, very impressive director, Tomas Alfredson. It's only his second film [ 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'], but he's a real find.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

I often say, with something like 'The Elephant Man,' had it been an American series for television, where you have to sign your life away for seven years...well, maybe I would never have made 'Sailcloth.'