Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.
The most useful form of time travel would be to go back a year or two and rectify the mistakes we made.
But we did see the process develop. I remember going to the Rocket Pictures base and they had something like 40 people there, drawing. They didn't know what the characters looked like yet and I remember on the walls seeing 30 or 40 different versions of Juliet. So, it was then that I realised that someone's got to come in and make some really executive decisions.
People see my impressions as a great skill and I am flattered, but there are things I can't do that everyone else can. I can do funny voices and funny faces but I can't drive.
If the worst that happens is that I wake up and see a picture of myself and a headline saying, 'He wasn't very funny last night', then I've got nothing to complain about.
What fun is life without a bit of showing off?
I think this [Gnomeo & Juliet] is the closest I ought to get to Shakespeare to be honest.
People will love something very much or hate something very much. But the great thing about a sketch show is that if something comes along that you don't like, something else will come along in a minute that hopefully you might like that.
You have to get rid of characters to make room for new ones, but you also have to recognize when things are done.
You wouldn't know how to perform a sketch that you don't find funny. You just couldn't do it.
I don't expect to be thin, but I'd like to feel a bit healthier.
I'm just glad that on a budget like this I don't have to make any of those hard decisions because I feel it must be a real job to direct this, as there's so much going on.
I finally learned to love myself by dressing up as Geri Halliwell.
I am a bit of a daydreamer.
I'm a very recent convert to the gay scene. I went to a party a couple of years ago and met a very nice man who took me under his wing and started taking me out to clubs. It was a revelation.
It's important to hold something back, though, because quite frankly my personal life is pretty dull and I don't want to bore people with it.
When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.
Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art.
I told Bernie Taupin that his best lyrics were for Song For Guy just because it doesn't have any words in it. But there you go... I'm a wind up! But a good Elton song for karaoke is I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues... "laughing like children, living like lovers, rolling like thunder under the covers..." Everyone can join in!
It was very pleasurable and easy and it was nice to work with friends... people I already knew, people I didn't know but I now count as friends. There is a lot of hard work that goes into the movie but I can't claim to have been any part of that.
It's very likely that graduates, current employees and retirees have some wonderful pieces of Deer Park history in their closets or garages.
I mean comedy is something that's very personal and people have strong opinions about.
I played Thersites and I remember we were also doing some places out of town before starting our run at The Old Vic in London and we were at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford and I walked on stage and I've got an opening speech that begins: "Agamemnon, how if he had boils?" And I went on and said: "Agamemnon..." And a woman in the front row just went 'tut'. I thought: "I've only done four syllables, give us a chance!" I got one word out and the audience were already tutting. It was worse than any heckle I ever had doing comedy. So, I'll stick to gnomes.
My favourite song of Elton's is... it's a tricky one for me. I'm a proper fan and I've probably seen him in concert about a dozen times before I even met him. Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, which isn't in this film... but whenever I see him, I always tell him that Passengers is my favourite song because it's one of his least auspicious ones.
Honestly, I was just happy to get the work. I was chuffed to bits. I know David Furnish and Elton John a bit and I remember David talking very excitedly about it. This was going back four or five years even, when we were doing Little Britain at the Hammersmith Apollo. I'd lost my voice that night, but still did the show. I remember thinking: "God, they're going to think that's my voice and I'm not going to get in the film!" But it's just been a pleasure to be a part of.
