“I’m so dependent on reacting to the other actors on the set, and to the director. I’m very responsive. I react. And I treasure the energy that reaction gives.”

The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

Working in film, if you work with great directors, you learn that after every take you must let go. Sitting with my wife at the Academy Awards, we both let the moment just go.

I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.

When I choose a role it’s either because I recognise the man, or that I’m very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don’t play him.

I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.

I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That’s how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other.

There are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It’s harder.

I do believe female directors, as well as our female writer, can bring out male vulnerability that some men can’t because they can’t face it.

I don’t want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn’t care what the audience think of you. That’s not why you are there. You mustn’t care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.

The showrunner relationship in television is what the director relationship in film, there’s really no more important relationship.

In Kurdistan, theres a lot of hardship – a lot of wars, a lot of bitter and difficult lifestyles. And witnessing all those made me a director.

There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release.

Casting directors now just see me as the hard-core sniper or prison guard.

I’m an unusual director in that my cut is usually shorter then the final released film. I like short films.

If the United States is to produce a nation of investors-as we must if we are to gain financial world-leadership-it is imperative that boards of directors be so constituted as to adequately represent the interests and inspire the complete confidence of investors of moderate substance.

Everyone can do a character the way they want to do it, unless the director tells them not to, which isn’t very common.