“Although it is a fantasy film, it’s as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.”

I’m amazed that things have panned out the way they have. I always say I’m so lucky, though my mum always says, ‘You make your own luck.’

People come into your life and people leave it… you just have to trust that life has a road mapped out for you.

I try to take the time to appreciate and I certainly do appreciate and I do feel proud but that is probably one of the things I need to work on, building a bit of time for myself.

When you start falling for somebody and you can’t stop thinking about when you’re going to see them again, I love that. Women are beautiful. They deserve to be cherished and respected.

I don’t do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn’t have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable.

I love it. I hate that word (fatherhood), but I love being a father; it’s changed everything in so many ways.

If you have kids who are struggling with dyslexia, the greatest gift you can give them is the sense that nothing is unattainable. With dyslexia comes a very great gift, which is the way that your mind can think creatively.

The process of making a movie is what I love. I thrive on that. It’s an exciting miracle, a mad adventure. I love being part of it.

I missed my home – like the physicality of my home, I missed my friends and my family mostly and just hanging out and being in your home country – culturally it feels right and that is what I miss.

I think it’s sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.

We have to make good use of the time we have. That simple. We have to wake up every day, knowing that it’s not just an ordinary day. We have to take the moment, seize each day.

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

I don’t care much about the money at all. Frankly, if I get the chance to kiss someone in a movie, they wouldn’t need to pay me at all.

I know you can be up one minute and drop the next, so I’m trying to maintain a steady course so I can have some longevity.

I crave working on those small independent movies because I love going to see those myself.

A big part of what I wanted to do with this character was go from when I was a boy and try and develop into a man, really try and play him as a man who is on this search, on a journey of personal, spiritual, political, social discovery.

For all the best teachers pride themselves on having a large number of pupils and think themselves worthy of a bigger audience.

A work of art doesn’t exist outside the perception of the audience.

It’s not so much a question of whether we’ve shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Honestly I think it was gradual from the first time I came. It’s been a gradual thing as far as audience and response wise. I feel like I was conditioned for this type of impact.

I am still very surprised that I managed to make that film [Close Up]. When I actually look back on that film, I really feel that I was not the director but instead just a member of the audience.

I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.

Being onstage is just a feeling that you cannot duplicate anywhere else because the energy that the audience is giving you forces you to give more energy. It’s such an output and exchange of energy. You can’t do that anywhere else.