I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.