You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.

I think the most insulting thing you can do to a director is to challenge when he or she is satisfied with your interpretation.

Somehow I think it was declared very early on that I was the - if not the black sheep of the family, not a very good student.

There were a few things that went into it. When you're doing something you're trying to be your audience at the same time, so if somebody tells me that this is a movie about retired opera singers, you think 'maybe I'll wait for it to come to DVD'. You're not rushing off to see it.

I think we all felt it on this movie - crew and cast. You never know when you're making a movie... no one is saying in the middle of Casablanca that this is going to be a classic. The lead actors had turned it down and I think they wound up with B-list actors at the time.

I think one of the things you have to be aware of as an actor is that if you come on the set and see the director standing there mouthing all the words while a scene is going on, that's usually a very bad sign because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head. He knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and you're not going to dissuade him.

A "take" is an opportunity to fail ... and we think that we have to get it right all the time.

I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been, and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been.

You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.