THE FILM THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

AS a child I had a passion for westerns made by John Ford, most of all The Searchers. This is Ford's greatest film, because it's his darkest. It is the story of a perfect family that's invaded and destroyed by dark forces.

The daughter (Natalie Wood) is taken away by Commanche Indians and Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) spends five years on a relentless quest to find her. It is one of the most terrifying portraits of obsession in cinema.

Ford was not afraid to confront everybody's darkest fears. I first saw the film when I was 10 and it was the first time I had a sense of something really diabolical. It was unlike anything that I had seen before and has had a deep influence on my work as an actor.

I realised that acting wasn't just about entertainment, that it was a kind of mystery that required touching deep and dark places. And I think that the ability really to go as dark and deep as a role requires, really to go to the limit, is a key trait of a great actor such as John Wayne.

In The Searchers, Wayne brings tremendous depth and history to the role of Ethan Edwards, an eerie quality of "otherness". You can sense a presence that is greater than anything that can be seen on the screen; there is a kind of a mystery, a darkness, something that is not fully visible.

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