I'm an optimist; I always hope that each new script is going to be a great story.

When I make a movie, I don't break it down and analyze it. I could but it would get in the way of doing a job - on instinct based on all the research we did going in. you want to trust yourself and your director and your acting partners in the circumstances you're shooting. I don't like to have any kind of overview.

I really enjoyed working with New Zealanders as crew members, as teammates. They're great, and it's a beautiful country. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, and I've traveled quite a bit.

I think that every person has many, many people inside of them. We change our personality depending on who we are talking to or what situation we are in.

In terms of the movie business, being in a 'Lord of the Rings' has given me more interesting options as work.

Toronto Film Festival is one of those festivals where there are 400 movies, and unless you have a distributor who is super confident and puts a lot of money into it, sometimes movies can go unwatched or unnoticed.

I wrote a letter to the magazine [Time magazine] pointing out that [Richard] Corliss's comparison of Christopher Lee's Saruman to Osama Bin Laden, and the vastly outnumbered defenders of Helm's Deep united against the Orcs to the "Coalition of the Willing" fighting the good fight against Muslim hordes, displayed the simplistic, xenophobic, and arrogant worldview that makes the government of the United States feared and mistrusted around the world. The editors claimed they had no space to print my brief letter, which I felt was dishonest and cowardly.