Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed dumb and silent when all else sings together in unison?

I don't know what has happened to movies but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi something with very important subject matters.

All my movies like Revenge are under two hours.

When we shoot 24 there are so many things I have to worry about from the script to technical things to my performance that I don't have a second to be bored or take anything for granted. We produce 24 hours of film a season which is like making 12 movies.

I'm pretty much a 9-to-5 kind of guy. I usually get to work about 8 in the morning and I work until 4 or 5 and sometimes I work on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Pretty much I keep the same hours as an accountant or clerk or whatever.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening and going once a day to beg for food.

Four hours of makeup and then an hour to take it off. It's tiring. I go in I get picked up at two-thirty in the morning I get there at three. I wait four hours go through it ready to work at seven work all day long for twelve hours and get it taken off for an hours go home and go to sleep and do the same thing again.

They put me on the shift where they thought I could do the least harm midnight to eight in the morning. Although the hours were lousy they were perfect for an apprentice reporter.

Some of those more out-there jokes were written in the wee hours of the morning. Somehow they remained funny the next day.