There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.

I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.

A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.

Nowadays filmmakers tend to recycle the same cliches over and over again.

In "The King's Speech," patriotism is utterly contained within a historical moment, the third of September, 1939, where the aggressor is clear, the fight is clear, it hasn't become complicated over time.