I'm only wanted by directors for the image I give off, and it makes me angry. I always wanted to be an actor and not a beauty pageant winner.

Mark Ruffalo is just an amazing guy and an amazing director.

Drama class was one of the only areas at school I responded to.

When I finished the trilogy of 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies, I had a gear shift and thought, 'I need to take a moment to smell the roses.'

I've done movies with a sword before. But I haven't really been given the full responsibility of something like a Ridley Scott film.

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family, about life, about death.

Until this movie I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done all of that already, and am ready for this phase of my career.

Although it is a fantasy film, it's as real as it can be. You have to imagine that an audience will buy their ticket to a cinema and get on a first-class flight and journey to Middle Earth.

Lord of the Rings was my first experience making movies and at the time, I had no ideas how movies were done. I thought that's the way they're done, so in a way, I had nothing to compare it to.

I don't do a film unless it has a sword in it. And if it doesn't have a sword in it, I insist that they have one in the same room to keep me comfortable.

I think a film set is a quite controlled environment and you feel like you can trust them and it is going to be a safe place to work, but I really don't think about it.

Well, everyone likes movies when they're a little kid.

I wouldn't use the word 'scared' for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.

Jonathan Demme is a very sharp editor of his movies.

I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page... sunrise over the desert and masses of... a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

The English are good at bad guys - the James Bond-style villain, cunning, slow-burning. The Americans are much more obvious about it.

I'm a little sheepish about it. Whenever I meet fans and they're like, 'Oh, you're so sexy,' I just don't get that. There's no way one man can be universally sexy.

The long and short of it is that I am now in a position in England to green light movies, and that's really excellent - not high-budget movies, but movies none the less.

You know, film is the ultimate goal in an actor's career. I mean, I still love TV. I have my feet firmly stamped in it. But my opportunities have been bigger and better.

What I like about their films is that you actually feel the momentum of whatever they're shooting. So, if someone's falling out a window, it gives the opportunity to show what that might feel like.

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

The earth laughs in flowers.

When I emerged from drama school, I had no expectation that I would ever work in film.

I have the embarrassing thing where often if you're watching a film, you kind of go through the emotions and the thought stages that your character went through, but you sort of do it with Tourette's. So I end up often crying when I'm crying, and looking angry when I'm looking angry, so it's pretty ugly