If movies have to satisfy every possible quadrant before they're even made, they're dull. You only get great things when people overreach themselves.

Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.

I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.

I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.

You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

I don't know why anybody would come to Ireland chasing a dream or even employment - that's an extraordinary thing for a place where traditionally one was unemployed. For 10 years, people were coming from all over the world looking for employment here, kind of an extraordinary phenomenon. That's stopped now.