Developing characters is a collective process, on one hand; it's an individual process on the other. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, as dear Oscar Wilde would say. A great of it, of course, is, 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.

Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone. You don't feel that you're being tested, as it were.

It's an immensely competitive business, and I can tell you the older you get, the parts are fewer, and the people who are proven performers are greater.

There may be arrangements to have me retired but I don't know. Things happen that I enjoy doing, and as long as I enjoy doing them I'll go about doing them, I guess.

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

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.

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.