Christopher Lee

There is a dark side in all of us. And for us 'bad' people, the bad side dominates. I think there is a great sadness in villains, and I have tried to put that across. We cannot stop ourselves doing what we are doing.

Before 'Lord of the Rings,' some people would have just classed Peter Jackson as a horror director. But there is a mind there.

The thing I have always tried to do is surprise people: to present them with something they didn't expect.

Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.

I don't play long parts. They must be short parts, but they've got to be parts that mean something, that matter, where people will notice when I'm on the screen, and people will remember the character after they've seen the film.

I think acting is a mixture of instinct, imagination and inventiveness. All you can learn as an actor is basic technique.

I am never going to stop playing the villain. I would be foolish to do so because the audiences apparently enjoy watching me, and who am I to say no?

Somebody once asked me how I found Peter Jackson, and I said: 'Well, I parted his hair, and there he was.'

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

I haven't spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy.

I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise, we would never have won.