I loved working with [ Lars Von Trier], but I've done two films before, so I was quite used to him.He's a man of incredible moods of course, but he's also a hugely perceptive man, and there's no getting away from that. And he's able to put that perception into something like film, so we're very lucky.

You carry that through and adapt it to a camera lens, but you're quite right, you cannot be sure of what an audience is going to do. You don't know what's going to happen to the piece you're doing anyway. You don't know how it's going to be edited. There are a lot more unknowns in cinema. But that you have to readily accept. That's when, I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement.

I don't like no confusion.

If you've got a great crew it's intense, but its quite short. 'The Elephant Man' was longer than most, for an independent film. That was a 14 week film. But it was because of the intrinsic difficulties. We had to invent a different way of filming, because the makeup was so long. A working day for me with a full makeup on was nineteen hours. So obviously you couldn't do that twice running.

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

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.