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That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I always do stories that I believe in, characters that I find interesting, and directors who I want to work with. All these factors have contributed while making choices and continue to as an actor and as a producer.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.