I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.
All confessions are Odysseys.
I'm grateful that so many viewers have related to characters I've played. I think many in the audience see themselves in my characters or feel like the characters are similar to their friends or sisters.
I think, for an actor, the whole world is a place of work because if you focus on characters and on stories, they are everywhere, so yeah, I feel very privileged to have had this great opportunities in the international cinema and especially in the American cinema.
The American horror movies are more moralistic, they have not only good characters, but characters where the ultimate danger is death. What I like about European cinema is they have another sense of what's good, what's bad, and sometimes all the characters are far more complex than just that. It's less binary, the Giallo genre.
I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television.
To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.
Cinema is actually very backward. When we see gay characters or people of color, they're always there for that reason. I'm personally kind of sick of that. I love to see characters who just live and breathe and are comfortable in that space.
I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
The nature of acting is that one is many characters and jumps from one skin to another as a way of life. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what all of your characters think at the same time. Sometimes one of my characters overrules one of my other characters. I'm trying to get them all to harmonize. It's a hell of a job. It's like driving a coach.
Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.
Different characters help you grow in cinema.
My sense of cinema improved slowly as I started watching South cinema, got to know that cinema is much appreciated here.
I got a chance to work with so many stalwarts from British cinema. Judi Dench, of course, who is a legend. Then there was my director Stephen Frears. He is the man who made some of British cinema's salient trendsetters.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.