I seem to watch less and less television. The best thing in 'Downton Abbey' is Penelope Wilton. She is always worth the watch.
As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.
I'd never done any Beckett before 'Krapp,' and I haven't done any of his other plays since. I've always felt that 'Krapp' is an autobiographical piece.
How my film career happened, I don't know. It was unplanned. I'd been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really 'The Naked Civil Servant' in 1975 that put me on the radar.
'The Naked Civil Servant' was as important for me as 'Easy Rider' was for Jack Nicholson. No question.
The clergy is in the same business as actors, just a different department.
My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.
I've lived publicly and never hidden behind closed doors. Therefore, if I have gone over the top sometimes, it has been visible.
I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you've lost your deposit. It's best if you don't say it.
Things come in a quieter way to me. It's not laziness, and it's not diffidence. I just know how far you have to bend for work. That's important for me.
It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.
If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.
Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realise that it is going to come to an end at some stage.
I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.
I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.
The difference between anger and deep remorse - remorse is much fatter. It's a deeper feeling altogether. Anger is too easy an escape for my money.
I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.
Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it's going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.
Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.
I don't care about the length of anything I play, as long as it's a good character.
