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.

We're blessed with, as we were on 'Harry Potter,' lead actors who are amazingly grounded people.

I don't know if it's harder but when you're playing a real person you want to honor their memory - even if they're a criminal or someone that the public loathed. That can be challenging.

All of these red carpet events may seem natural for you journalists, but it doesn't feel natural for actors.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

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.

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.