We had a script that was really solid and we knew how we were going to shoot and how the energy of it was going to go. So it gave us a lot of freedom to use the camera as a character.
Some scripts you read and say, 'I've just got to do this' and you find a way of making it work. Some things you turn down because of the impact on family.
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.
Some people say that they read the first 20 pages, and then decide if they want to do the film or not. But, I have to read the entire thing 'cause anything can change in a script.
I get asked to give stuff to my dad. I'm, like, 'I'm not gonna pass your script to him!' You know? My dad's my dad. I'm not his agent.
In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That's not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It's a different point in both our lives.
A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It's important to alternate between the two activities.
What Tim does is, he calls me and sends me the script. And then he sends me a drawing, an illustration of his image of me as the character. It's so great.
You can have a great character in a really bad script, and the film will never be seen. It's just too much work to commit to a film and not have it released.
A lot of times you have to dip into the independent world to find the really great projects and the really great scripts. They're out there - you just have to search hard.
Girls in scripts are often pretty but brainless, or geeky and no one likes them, so it's great to find richer roles. Chalk and cheese aspects of people are very interesting to play.
I still read scripts, and if something great comes along, that's great... but this is my day job. The Row is where I go every day.
You live for those really great scenes where you almost feel that the film has gone beyond what was printed on the script pages and been raised to another level.
As a jobbing actor, I never get a script and go 'I can't be bothered with this.' Life doesn't work like that. For a movie star, maybe, but for a jobbing actor, that doesn't happen.
I enjoy co-directing or even being there just for support because you get to see your script come to aural life in front of you.
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
I remember reading the script for 'Dangerous Liaisons' and thinking that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life watching this film; the story and the writing were so wonderful.
I would love to produce a film. I have written a script and am in the process of writing another, so maybe it will happen down the road. I would love to do a film in Africa.
I'm not really that keen on mainstream; I'm not interested in doing the normal films. I do tend to go for the quirky, different scripts.
I don't really get into a big intellectual analysis of why I am going to do a certain script or not.
I won't be able to do what I'm doing forever. There aren't that many scripts floating around for fifty-year-old chicks.
