Actors are the best and the worst of people. They're like kids. When they're good, they're very very good. When they're bad they're very very naughty.

It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.

I come from the theatre, my bones are in the theatre; it’s as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre

If it's good art, it's good.

The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.

I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in Cinderella. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly.

Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.