“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.

I’d like [Santa Claus] to give Wes Anderson, the director, enough money in his next budget for an aerial shot – just a little copter shot. He really wanted this one helicopter shot, and Disney wouldn’t give him the money. Just wouldn’t give him the money.

When you trust your director completely, then you can relax, be spontaneous, be malleable.

My height can be a problem. A lot of directors and photographers are sometimes not happy because I’m pretty tall and especially if I work with short actors the difference can be pretty massive.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

Whatever talent I had, I’m sure it helped that my parents were in the business and that I grew up around actors, comedians and directors.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood.

If you look at the types of directors out there, I’m not as weird as most of them.