No one wants to say, 'That's not funny,' when you're working.

I'd have to say that it kills me that there's a concern that 'Torchwood' has gone to America to become Americanised.

Television tends to be a more difficult medium for me to get my head around sometimes when it comes to certain things I get offered.

I've always wrestled against being typified in one way or another.

Sometimes you fall into the niche of being the confidant guy, or the good-looking guy, or being too charactery, or not charactery enough.

A lot of people just ask me about how I can do small budgets and big budgets, but many actors do both. I think the more self-destructive impulse I have is doing so many different characters.

I have never forgotten John Candy's generosity. He showed me how to be a gentle leader.

Commercial movies have to end with moral flags flown again and all that.

I think you do independent movies because you're looking to cut away from commercial movies.

Sometimes when you really try to be earnest, everything disappears. If you really try to make a romantic movie, the first thing that goes out the window is the romance or real passion. It suddenly becomes cute-ville or cozy-ville. It's another world other than life.

I did this play, 'Expedition 6,' that I worked on for three years in between other things. It was a good, interesting time for me because I trained as a theater director, and I went back, and we toured it around.

I was doing this children's theater play, and it was non-Equity. We were out of town to do it at the Kennedy Center, and it was always kind of, 'Well, the producers may have to turn this into Equity,' and that's what happened. It was kind of a silly children's theater play, but that's how I got my card.

I'm fascinated by movies and enjoy that, of course, but always, the measure of how you are functioning in the arts was theater.

I never had any idea of going into movies.

I watched John Wayne movies, matinees - things like that. It was only in college that I saw European films. That became more of what I was interested in.

I always love challenges and doing something that I can't quite figure out.

American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.

I've done a lot of different kinds of things, so different people remember me for different things.

There's always a certain kind of homework you have to do when there's an accent involved.

I'm intrigued by a tough situation, and I try to do something with it.

There's something that comes into you that's so exciting when you're directing.

The idea of taking classic American stories and reinterpreting them for a time and place is not just commercially viable. These stories also carry a sensual nature of what it meant to be an American, and they deserve to be reinterpreted.

'The Virginian' has a very important romantic story line that you don't find in a lot of Westerns... At the heart of the story is quite a bit of pain and a sense of loss.

I'm a very discriminating shoe shopper. I only look for something special. In fact, I don't think I've ever bought two pairs at the same time.