About Ralph Fiennes: Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes is an English actor. A noted Shakespeare interpreter, he first achieved success onstage at the Royal National Theatre.
What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.
In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.
I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.
I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.
I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.
I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.
It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.
Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.
Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.
There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.
We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.
Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.
You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.
There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman's attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, 'Ahhhh!'
There is a humanitarian impulse that one aspires to and there are days when one doesn't do it very well.
I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.
I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.
I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.
As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.
I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.
