I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

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

The Maigret stories are all very different in terms of the content and the way that the stories are told. They're not what I would call formulaic.

[Maigret Sets a Trap] was always going to be the first film, and it seemed to be quite a nice story. But of course it meant that here I was playing this new character for the first time, in a place where he had been a relative failure, as all these people had been murdered and the pressure was on. Rather than starting optimistically with his pipe in front of the fireplace, he was in quite a difficult place.

I've no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes' work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my - hang on.

To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.