If you listen, you learn; if you talk, you don't.

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.

Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.

Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realize that it is going to come to an end at some stage.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

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.

I got used to [ Lars Von Trier] doing the narration for 'Dogville' and 'Manderley.' And I said to him I do these narrations for you but you never put me in a film! So he called my bluff and put me in 'Melancholia' and I was thrilled about that.