Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peace' - it's like you're in a comedy sketch and you think you're smart.
One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week. So the events that occur are rarely life-changing. But with film, you can say that this thing only happened once; this is a major thing that happened to these people.
I was just interested in directing. So I just kept having a go at trying to write little scripts and get things together, and my wife just had a slip of the tongue and said, "Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life" when she meant to say "Frank Capra's." There it is right there. That's a gag that we could make into something.
One of the very, very exciting things I have found here in L.A. is that no one talks to you about being Scottish. Whereas, if you are in London and you are trying to put films together and be a film-maker, there is a kind of unspoken sense that, if you are Scottish, you have something to overcome or else you cannot really do that project.
It'll be sad not to be Doctor Who anymore because that's an incredible thing to wake up in the morning and go, 'Oh, I'm still Doctor Who!' And you can go and blow up some monsters, and that's how you spend your day. And also when you walk around people don't see Peter anymore, he's not here, it's Doctor Who they see and he gets many more smiles than I do. It'll be sad to say goodbye.
I knew Richard E. Grant, and I went to him and said "Would you like to [play Kafka in the film]?" and he said yeah, and then suddenly I had all these people who were happy to come along. We got a little bit of money from Scottish Screen to pay for it. I got so many favors because I knew people in the business. I was in a remarkably good position. I got so many favors from people. I got the Monty Python technical people.
I was amazed to go Oscar and win it. It was fantastic getting up on the stage there and looking down. I thought, "That guy looks like Steve Martin, and that guy's like Arnold Schwarzenegger." But it was Steve Martin, and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then they have this terrible kind of conveyor belt backstage - literally - where they take you to this big hangar where the world's press are gathered, and they make you stand on a stage, and they introduce you.