On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible.

You can't do what you've been asked to do unless you do the best you can. And roughly speaking, the best you can do is to be very available as a character and actor to the people you're acting with. That's equally important, whether the camera's on the other person or on you.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings

The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived

We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.