God knows, I haven't always been successful.
— Daniel Day-Lewis
Germans don't speak in a German accent, they just speak German.
Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.
I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.
I have always been intrigued by these lives I have never experienced.
I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way.
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
If you have a certain wildness of spirit, a cabinet maker's workshop is not the place to express it.
Perhaps I'm particularly serious, because I'm not unaware of the potential absurdity of what I'm doing.
Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.
I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.
I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.
I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.
I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.
If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.
My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.
There's nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you're not a true ally to the person who's in charge of all that.
In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.
I just knew at an early time in my life how important privacy was.
A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.
We all live under some repression; we have to, it's part of the deal.
My preference is that, that day when someone sticks a tripod in front of you with a camera on the top, it is not day one.
I love to sit and watch people. I love to sit and listen to people.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
As a member of the audience I don't like it that I can't see what's going on in the eyes and in the face and in the most subtle responses of a performer when I'm more than a few rows back. I find it very frustrating.
Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.
How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.
I find it easier to work when it's quiet.
I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.
I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.
I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.
Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.
The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.
When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.
I'm not picky, quite honestly.
I've been very lucky.
I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.
Well, we all have murderous thoughts throughout the day, if not the week.
For as long as I can remember, the thing that gave me a sense of wonderment and renewal... has always been the work of other actors.
I'm a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that's the most obvious.
Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.
I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.
I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.
I hate wasting people's time.
I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.
I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.
The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.
Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from.
There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.
