'The Elephant Man' was hugely enjoyable to do. I thought the one stage, when Chris Tucker did the first makeup and it took 12 hours, I thought they'd actually found a way for me not to enjoy filming.

Often I don't read novels. The script is more important, that's the springboard to your imagination, really. Peripheral information can be interesting to read but you can't use it when it's not in the script.

Elephant Man [movie] was much more difficult physically. This had a couple of days. It was quite tricky. I had my leg strapped up behind me and I am a little older now. It was all marvelous, though. He [Bong Joon-ho] is one of the most fabulous directors in the world.

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.

One wonders sometimes, looking at the world, how it's dealing with itself. There are days when you wake up and you feel very optimistic and there are days when you feel pessimistic.

When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel...