“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the expansion to countries like Asia, China, Malaysia.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

You need intelligence and special forces. And, most importantly, you need to resurrect Afghanistan from what is literally the graveyard of countries and transform it into a normal country, which the Afghans want.

But all development programs of the United States and the European countries unfortunately exclude the private sector, which could make investments based on profitability.

This may well have made it more rather than less democratic than many countries today .

Then I tell them: Don’t keep attacking us as you have done for the last years.

When monarchies were collapsing in a number of countries, we had radicals and we had Nasserism.

Should we stand by idly while this happens at our doorstep, in one of the countries in which al-Qaida has a huge presence?