If I hadn't been a part of [Harry Potter] I would have been deeply upset.

I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!

I find it difficult to say, like "which child do you prefer the most", and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.

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.

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.

Snowpiercer has both [optimistic and pessimistic]. It was essentially optimistic. The most pessimistic was my part, because of his knowledge. He knows how it started. The status quo, he knows, has to be maintained, otherwise there is no chance. He knows that this revolution is completely understandable and is also commendable. He also knows the negatives. In the end, that's not a very positive position to be in.

I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken; the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.