What I try to look for is something that a general audience can relate to, to have an investment in these extraordinary people who achieve extraordin… - Benedict Cumberbatch

I don’t know if watching your own work is a good or bad thing. I don’t know how much I learn from it. Each individual circumstance holds its own world of singularities and peculiarities. But among that, you can go: “Oh yeah, I remember that was what I tried to do.” Sometimes it doesn’t fit with the cast or the energy of the scene or the beat of another character. But to sit down in the audience and go: “Oh my God, I think that was what I intended”, was great.

You know, I’m not a fan of horror. I’m a fan of some of those films, but I’m not a fan in the sense I find it very difficult to watch them. I’m very suggestible and gullible and I buy into what I’m watching and it just haunts me for too long afterwards. It just scares me for longer than the moment in the film. I don’t really like living a life in horror or terrors, other than that in the real world without my imagination creating more. Horror is not my genre go-to. It’s not my genre go to.

Situations where what I say echoes much further than what is healthy. I would love to just have the work do the talking. We’re in positions where people ask us questions; they want to know about more than just the work. And it can go into areas where I’ve completely shot my mouth off, whether it’s too much about my private life or being too opinionated about things in the world. I think the better thing to do—I’ve learned this from people far wiser than me—is to do very good, quiet work behind closed doors.