Well you know, the comic strip [Doctor Strange]... yeah, was an Asian man, in fact, a very ancient Tibetan man living on the top of a mountain. The film script that I was given wasn't an Asian man, so I wasn't asked to play an Asian man - I was asked to play an ancient Celtic person.

The story, it's really important to The Ancient One that Doctor Strange does cut it because The Ancient One needs a successor, or certainly needs - you could say - a son. So The Ancient One is really invested in Doctor Strange, it's a very kind of primal relationship.

I mean, even in terms of the Marvel universe, this [Ancient One character] is going on a side street into a major piazza that Marvel hasn't even been to before, because it's all about creation and not so much about destruction and forestalling destruction, it's about your mind.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day.

I've been really happy to be in that conversation with Scott [Derrickson] for a few months now. We started chewing this cud a while ago. He is, as you probably know, an extremely erudite thinker in terms of religious philosophy and just thinking about a modern take on something really, really ancient, about how to imagine living beyond any physical bounds, which we're on the verge of now.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.