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 left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.

I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

We shot ['Sailcloth'] five days down in Cornwall, and you couldn't have asked for a more beautiful place. It was a couple of tough days at sea, but when I say tough it was still enjoyable.

There are certain people that when they ask you to do a film, you just say, "Where and when?"