Certainly for my father, there were great times, good times, not-so-good times. He might be shooting a Fellini film for six months, then not working for two months. I'm used to that dynamic.

They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

I work best when a little scared, when there's so much more than the lines to think about.

They know you're not Alfred Hitchcock, but you need to be enough Alfred Hitchcock for them not to be bothered by it. That's a reassuring thing.

Often jobs are un-turndownable even before you read the script. You go, "Well, I have to do that."

I think it will be, as always, interesting to compare different portrayals of Hitchcock. I'm very honored that I'm playing the same part as Anthony Hopkins.

Best ever was filming in Barcelona last year, and I had a couple of scenes with De Niro. He's a very shy man. Speaks so quietly that people tend to bend down and adopt the same tone, almost the same voice, whenever they talk to him - watching, you'd think someone's offering to carry out a hit for him when they're just offering him a cup of coffee.