Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film.
Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.
My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.
In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.
I think I make films to help bolster and feed the part of me that wants to remain in a positive relationship with the world and to engage in it. So hopefully in non-sentimental ways, I'm trying to make something that helps make me happy.
I would have liked to come back in '300'; they did an origins film of '300' just recently, and it would have been fun to come back and see what happened to my character.
You need supporting actors to help to tell the story. For me, I'm lucky to be a part of the films. Being an actor, I'll take any role, whether it's supporting or leading.
Maybe because I come from choreography, I've always felt that there's something about action films that made it very natural for me to go that way. It's story through movement.
Any film I've made, I've only really begun to understand in the cutting room. That's when the story shows itself to you, like a wreck coming out of the sea.
I said I did not know enough about UNICEF to handle a press conference and she said they would not want to talk about it they would only want to talk about films.
England is strictly class-based. What's surprising is how many films are still made with a load of people in silly frocks running around gardens and talking in middle-class accents.
It makes it difficult to decide which to go see, since no film about say, some tragic genocide in Africa is going to get a bad review even if it's poorly made.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
If you take my performance or my understanding of the role and my appreciation for story and then dress it in CGI, that I guess becomes an action film.
The reality is that I always envisioned the 'Riddick' franchise as a continuing mythology, so I always imagined that there would be many other films to follow.
I approach 'Fast & Furious 6' the same way I would approach a Sidney Lumet film. Getting into character's getting into character.
I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.
Film is like football - you join a team, get close to one or two people, then never hear from them again. I don't get emotionally involved. Do one, move on.
When I came up with the character of Wicket for 'Return Of The Jedi', which was my first film, I was a kid of 11 years old, and I basically was playing a very young Ewok.
There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.
I discovered that, in order to write a magnificent piece, you should shoot the images because once you are filming, you are writing the script in your mind.
