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Some of your choices have been quite risky.

I try to keep things as mixed up and varied as possible. I'm not consciously thinking, "Well, I've done that, so now I must do this." It's more instinctive. When I look back on the choices I've made, it's pretty varied. Some movie stars - in inverted commas - have constructed a strong persona, there's a role they play, and they have to protect that. I want the opportunities that are out there, but I'm not interested in repeating things.

Can you let go of a project when your bit is done?

It's very difficult. But film is a director's medium, not an actor's. You've got to work that out pretty fast. If you're after control as an actor, you're going to get yourself into a very odd situation. In fact, you probably should be doing something else. You've got to be smart and go with the best scripts and the best directors, and then trust them to get on with it.

Do you have any kind of 'method'?

I worry when I hear actors talking about how they get into a role. Acting is about concentration. It's about turning up and concentrating very hard. That can be tiring if you do it day after day. But it's about staying focussed and disciplined, not about staying in character.

Children of Men was a remarkable film. Very political and issue-driven...

Absolutely. Even though it's set in 2027 it's more relevant than most films that are set in the present day. Immigration, the environment, the climate of fear and repression... these are issues people are very concerned about now. My character's main traits are apathy, cynicism, depression. Holding a film together with a leading character like that, a guy who has pretty much given up, was very challenging.

And back to car chases again... there's an incredibly complex chase sequence in the film that was shot in a continuous 12-minute take.

Hugely ambitious. The guy doing the camera rig said it simply couldn't be done. Impossible. That we'd have to break it down into its component scenes. But they invented a new rig, which meant that we could go into the car and keep the camera moving around everyone and then back out again.

It took ages to set up, and some days we didn't shoot a thing. And the producers are breathing down your neck the whole time. Most people would have bottled it and compromised but Alfonso [Cuaron, director] refused to give in.

There were some strange cars in the film too. A Fiat Multipla in that sequence, a five-door Renault Avantime in another scene. And Michael Caine's character drives an old Citroen CX estate. What were the reasons for such choices?

I remember there was an issue with the cars in the film. Alfonso's vision for the future in the film was one that looked like now, but had gone backwards rather than forwards.

The design guys wanted to do futuristic things, and he kept saying, "Use cars that look modern now, then break them down..." So they got covered in ugly plastic bumpers. He used to joke that this was a $70m film, and he was trying to make it look as cheap as possible.

The writer David Mamet described you as being 'the enigmatic impersonation of restraint' while Robert Altman said that you 'don't act, you occur'. Do you ever find yourself going, "My God, that's nice..."

Er, yeah. But I've been going, "My God, that's nice" for quite a while now.

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