“People are scared to make something that doesn’t look like another film that made a lot of money. It means we get ‘Four Weddings And A Funeral’ made again and again.”

Acting, music, painting… it’s very subjective. So what I might think is a great actor, you might think is not a very good actor at all.

I don’t think I’d have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.

Rather than thinking, ‘If I do this, and in five years I’ll be where I want to be,’ you’re better just doing something that makes you happy now.

A lot of ideas took us to dead ends or we found the tone wasn’t just right. I think we discovered very quickly this wasn’t just a song to end The Battle of the Five Armies – it was a song to say goodbye to Middle-earth.

Sometimes the songs you think will be best don’t turn out to be best.

I really like acting but, just now, the more I read a script I find myself thinking I’d like to direct rather than act.

The innocent on a quest, the pretender, an inanimate object that holds evil – it’s really strange that these themes are there in so many different countries’ folklore.

I was probably about fourteen I think, and probably like every boy who’s fourteen that writes a song, it was about a girl. It was about a girl who I really liked, but she didn’t like me as much as I liked her. I think most guys go through that.

But you talk to most filmmakers and it is six, seven, eight years trying to get things off the ground. It is incredible really.

For me, what makes great actors, always is how truthful they are to the character and the story and the emotion that they’re trying to tell.

I’d like to win a Booker Prize for writing. A Nobel Peace Prize for my work in peace… and I think that’ll probably do.

Hobbits are a lot like Scots. It’s all about nature and enjoying their land, which is a very Scottish thing.

Life in LA is not lying in the sun for months. It is having a 4pm meeting and leaving at noon to sit in traffic for four hours. Its not glam.

He [Viggo Mortensen] was standing behind the camera throwing the apples … And I’ve never seen him so happy.

I like people like Ani DiFranco, a band called Elbow, of course John Lennon, George Harrison, Barry White. I have a lot of different influences and hopefully they all come together and make some sense.

A eugoogoolizer…one who speaks at funerals…Or did you think I was too stupid to know what a eugoogooly was?

Many punishments sometimes, and in some cases, as much discredit a prince as many funerals a physician.

The Madiba song may have ended, but its melody lingers on.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.