I love the States and their attitudes about entertainment.
Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.
The thing is, in America, it just seemed ridiculous - I mean, the idea of having a hit record over there, ... It was just something you could never do.
I think the greatest star in American at the moment is Kevin Costner.
There are certain things that I know I don't want to do anymore. Playing out-and-out terrorists who terrorise people and don't actually move the conversation on are not worth doing. So that's probably another reason I don't go back to America, because a lot of it is like that. It's boring, dull, very lazy writing.
Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.
'Twin Peaks' is my favorite American TV show.
I?m much bigger in Britain than I am there. I'm well-known, but my name's That Guy in America. . . . People shout: "Hey ? I know you! You're That Guy.".
Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight.
Since I started acting, I've always been aware of the sort of 'beastly entity' that is America and Hollywood, and semi-consciously, I devised a kind of route in - I'd seen a lot of people try and fail.
In the first years after the systemic transition, our screens showed American entertainment that had not been available before, or had been available only sporadically.
We have a lot of great stars and so many different things, some of the other countries don't have that. So when they get somebody, they support them to the death. America, I kind of think we take it for granted sometimes.
It's not an anti-sex trip. Like, we're taking sex, which is probably another half of American entertainment, sex and violence, and we're projecting it, and we're saying this is the way everything is right now.
Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make.
I never once dreamed of sort of being able to be in an American TV series, you know? It was all about theater and touring and sort of being an actor around Scottish theater.
