 Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't. |
| John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London. |
| I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen. |
| I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable. |
| But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible. |
| 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. |
| In cinema, the leading player is the director. |
| Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries. |
| I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child. |
| 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. |
| Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work. |
| As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now. |
| I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language. |
| I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate. |
| I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities. |
| 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. |
| There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word. |
| I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative. |
| When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting. |
| In England, it's now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It's not even on my passport anymore. They've taken Mister away from me. |
