I didn't worry about what DeNiro thought... I went in, looked him in the eye, and got the part. I was confident, even though I'd never done anything like it before. Now I realise it was ignorant confidence-I had no idea.

It's very hard to impose your beliefs or a specific message about any given movie. I think that audiences always extract what they want from a film even if something isn't overtly political. They may or may not get it, and it's hard to control that.

I suppose playing an older man is a way of preparing myself for getting older.

I think actors make the mistake of finding their little niche in the business and once they try to do something a little darker, boom, they get slapped across the face for it, so they go back to what they did before.

I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours.

It was closer to manual labor than shooting a film. I always think of something Michael Caton-Jones told me: 'Pain is temporary. Film is forever.'

I don't think there's a specific science you can put on dream psychology. I think that it's up to the, obviously, the individual.