The thing about romance and romantic movies is that they can be somewhat melodramatic. For a lot of actors, there's a certain cringe factor that's involved with that.

You could argue that 'Sweeney Todd' was romantic, if you looked closely at it, but it didn't impart that to its audiences. But it's large, and it's melodramatic, and it's a style I like to work in periodically.

My view is that life is too short. I'm not being melodramatic or anything, but when your mother dies in your arms - just you and her, and it's one o'clock in the morning, and you're waiting for her to exhale - you just think, life's too bloody short to argue about the little things.

It's interesting - I always thought when I was doing more melodramatic stuff like 'Everwood' that the directors were constantly reeling me in and stopping me from being funny.

The thing about romance and romantic movies is that they can be somewhat melodramatic. For a lot of actors there's a certain cringe factor that's involved with that.

I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.

It's interesting - I always thought when I was doing more melodramatic stuff like 'Everwood' that the directors were constantly reeling me in and stopping me from being funny.