One of the conventions that I always liked was Doctor Zhivago, where everything that's written on the screen is in Russian but everyone speaks English. That seemed to me to be quite a good convention to follow.

It's not easy to take a sit-com and turn it into a feature.

[Maigret] is terribly self-contained, not that I would ever wish him to be any more comic, particularly, but in the second film we've made you see he's a little more ironic from time to time. But as I say, that's just work in progress.

Nope, I don't enjoy work generally. Not because I'm lazy; it's just all so stressful and worrying.

Look, if I'd wanted a lecture on the rights of man, I'd have gone to bed with Martin Luther.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

The job is interesting, and the task is difficult, but the man [Maigret] is just a decent man doing a very ordinary job.