I think moviemakers are dramatists.

When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

You step forward and make it real for a start. You choose a sensible moment in history. Funnily enough, England was bankrupt and the moment is the death of Richard The Lionheart... Richard takes an arrow in the neck collecting a small debt from a small castle on his way home from the Crusades because he's penniless.

My career seems to be a career of non-specific subjects which are all over the place.

That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion... Everyone are tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god.

I was always amazed about how much I could finally squeeze into a thirty second commercial.