Chiwetel Ejiofor

I feel that I don't have to wait around for good scripts anymore, that I can get things moving more quickly. I can ring up directors I like and say I'm keen to work with them, which is pretty great.

The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.

In England, there's no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.

It's a weird thing when you spend your life trying to find these great scripts and great parts. You are reading scripts, you are traveling the world, you are hassling your agent. You are trying to find that script.

From deep in the slave hut is somebody calling over 150 years to all of our experiences and all of our ideas on human respect, and all of our ideas on dignity. And I felt like that's just incredibly powerful.

I think that all the talented filmmakers sort of share, I think, a sense of allowing magic to happen; of creating a stable and secure environment for performers to feel they can push to the end of their ability.

I started, obviously, doing theater, and I always thought that I would; in a way, I always thought that I'd be a theater actor. When I was starting out, I didn't really plan on making films, actually.

I've just tried to keep my eyes open, tried to read everything you can, and tried to see whether I see myself within it. If I do, then I can get excited about it.

I think when I was doing 'Amistad,' I was just too young to really understand what the process was, and beyond that, I hadn't really got involved. It was just somehow - and I thought that the artistry was all in the theater.

Dividing everybody into genders and sexuality and races and religions, and I think it's important to have films out there, to have discussions out there which really try to get to grips with where that kind of thing can lead.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.