Kenneth Branagh
I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.
There's always something to think about in terms of problems that are dark and important and immediate and scary.
I'll tell you what I'm grateful for, and that's the clarity of understanding that the most important things in life are health, family and friends, and the time to spend on them.
'Thor' has got several big battles in it, a reckless, headstrong young hero who has to confront his past and deal with a complicated relationship with his father, it has lots of savage Europeans hacking each other to death at various points, and all of this sounded very much like 'Henry V.'
I think television goes through phases, like other creative arts, where suddenly a group of people are producing exciting work all at once.
I've lived a lot of my life in London, so I often feel that I am a Londoner.
You go to the airport and look at the bookstand, and you feel the titles are similar, the covers are similar, and you wonder how they can be different.
Certainly, I'm excited by epic subjects. It doesn't particularly frighten me.
One of the problems with Shakespeare is that you can never give him a ring.
Even in the case of a god, audiences - paradoxically - enjoy recognizing the human traits.
When you cast someone like Natalie Portman, the character can't just be the love interest.
I don't know that the Brits have the monopoly on being organized, but they do have a way of working with which I'm familiar. It's not necessarily the best way, but it's a way.
I think I do have a way of predicting - not always accurately - what is a nerve-wracking day for actors, what may be a difficult scene or a difficult moment, how small - and it may be down to one line - a thing maybe that is upsetting or undermining a performance.
What you want is the opportunity to work and an audience. Prizes after that are just a great big bonus.
Variety is very, very good. Going from medium to medium, if you get the chance to do it, from theater to television to film, which are all distinctly different, keeps me sharp.
'Jack Ryan' is a very fast-paced, very contemporary, very action-driven thriller.
I did 'Love's Labour's Lost' in the theater and found it to be riotously funny.
Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.
The director needs to be in command on set because everything crumbles if that's not the case.
My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.
I loved 'Kundun.'
At the end of every stage performance, the audience all applaud me for doing my job, but I have friends who work in offices who don't get that.
For what it's worth, I enjoy 'Dexter,' 'Modern Family,' 'True Blood' and 'Breaking Bad.' I've enjoyed the wonderful 'The Pacific.'
In any given project, there are a few moments where there is the usual disappointment, as it were, when you look in the mirror, and you realize you're not 23 and looking like Brad Pitt.
I saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet when I was 17, and he directed me as Hamlet when I was 27, and I directed him as Claudius in 'Hamlet' when I was 35, and I'm hoping we meet again in some other production of Hamlet before we both toddle off.
I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast.
In Northern Ireland, I truly, effortlessly, knew who I was. I knew where I belonged. I felt completely and utterly secure.
I'm basically quite a cheerful person.
I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.
What I've found about 'Cinderella' is that what it provokes in an audience is really extraordinary. It appears to be a deceptively simple tale, but I've heard nothing but people drawing all different things out of it.
I had a friend who introduced me to a meditation practice which involves a couple of half-hours a day of meditation, where essentially you try to achieve a stillness that allows you to just be there in the moment.
I'm a devotee of Stephen Sondheim. I think he's a genius.
I did 'Celebrity' by Woody Allen. I did 'The Gingerbread Man' with Robert Altman. These were big talents.
The BAFTA is both absolutely fantastic and sort of meaningless at the same time.
I've always loved the Bond films.
Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.
My definition of success is control.
I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.
We're self obsessed and mad and stupid - not that other people can't be the same way - but the extremes are kind of honest in some mad way. Anyway, I like them.
There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.
The long version of the play is actually an easier version to follow. In all of the cut versions the intense speeches are cut too close together for the audience and the actors.
The glory of 70mm is the sharpness of the image it offers.
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
The best actors, I think, have a childlike quality. They have a sort of an ability to lose themselves. There's still some silliness.
So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.
Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.
It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.
In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.