"People told me, when I was coming through the ranks, that a mark of a great actor is one who deals with the period of unemployment as well as they deal with the period of employment"
"Families, particularly, tend to be the ones that you take the most for granted. They seem to slip under the radar, all those important things - it almost becomes second nature to do so"
"Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined"
"I have a friend who, if she has a bad hair day, it affects her whole mood because it is part of her sexuality, her confidence. I don't have that problem any more"
"When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen"
"When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men"
"There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that"
"People do more important jobs than acting in film that should be recognised, but for some reason it's big money, so people are elevated in status. If I was a bus driver, I'm sure you wouldn't be interviewing me"
"I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting"
"If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it"
