Sure, you can do something frothy and ridiculous, but you should probably be confident that it's going to be a sure-fire hit. Then it's sensible, because it enables you to make smaller movies. But if you make something frothy and ridiculous that doesn't work, it's not worth it.

Paul Bettany

My experience of people is that they are infinitely forgivable.

Paul Bettany

people

I feel like the world we live in seems to be full of an increasingly grey area, but the culture that we live in seems to be getting really entrenched in black and white positions, and I think it's urgent to talk about that because it's going to kill us all.

Paul Bettany

black-and-white culture thinking

When I became a father acting sort of took the place of what I did in my free time and my children became the main focus. I play a lot and my children play. Both my sons - my daughter's still too young really - have surpassed me with their music skills, which is wildly irritating.

Paul Bettany

daughter father children

I was always waiting for the secret to be handed down to me. Ron Howard asked me what I was waiting for and I went, "Ron, I'm waiting to know the secret. I keep feeling there's some sort of secret that's going to passed on from a director." He went, "Oh no. There is none. You've just got to on and do it and make mistakes and figure it out."

Paul Bettany

waiting mistake feelings

I really like telling stories. When I was a kid, I wanted to write songs. In quite a fundamental, gratifying, childish way, I enjoy the doing of telling a story.

Paul Bettany

writing song kids

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely.

Paul Bettany

asking-questions errors light

You'll still work with some directors where that doesn't happen, and sometimes it's out of necessity because you're in a really complicated, choreographed fight scene and the whole thing is being prevised in a computer, so it's been decided months before, but I think that's sneaking into the way action scenes are shot.

Paul Bettany

fighting way thinking

People have suggested that perhaps we are too affluent to be telling this story, which is amazing to me because then I wonder what story I am allowed to tell. Having been working with the homeless for the past years, I noticed lots of things about them, but one thing I really noticed was that they were probably too busy just getting though the day to make a film about themselves.

Paul Bettany

people past years

There's one place on my body that I can scratch and that's my nose so anything else is impossible. Plus, my hands are purple so I get everything purple.

Paul Bettany

entertainment

My relationship with 'Star Wars' is that I'm old enough that I saw it when it first came out - 'A New Hope,' that is - and it was like when Dorothy steps out of black and white into Technicolor. I was transported from a gray, miserable 1970s London into a different galaxy, and I didn't know what it was, but I wanted to be a part of it.

Paul Bettany

new black-and-white hope relationship

I'm never late, and I love that. Because when you've got three kids and a life to be living, and somebody's half an hour late to set, you start to get a little bit like, 'Come on. Come on, let's get this done.'

Paul Bettany

start you love life

We all have different thresholds for sentimentality. For me, it's a hard won happy ending.

Paul Bettany

ending me hard happy

In marriage, there's a lot of ignoring each other, which is hard to fake on-screen.

Paul Bettany

ignoring hard fake marriage

The fact that in America bread lasts so long. You buy bread, and then it's bread forever - it's Forever Bread!

Paul Bettany

you bread long america

Yeah, I love history and I loved it as a kid.

Paul Bettany

loved kid love history

I got a phone call from Jon Favreau saying, 'I need the voice of a personality-less robot, and I thought of you immediately.' I thought that was the funniest thing I ever heard, so I said, 'Yes.'

Paul Bettany

phone-call phone you voice

I resist the idea of there being on-screen chemistry. I think it's something that people like to say without thinking.

Paul Bettany

think chemistry people thinking

I did eight months of training for 'Wimbledon,' and then, by the time I finished the movie another four months later, I was like, 'That's me. I'm done with tennis.'

Paul Bettany

me training done time

I'm an immigrant - I've got to be in the city: London, Vienna, or Rome, but always a city.

Paul Bettany

immigrant city always rome