"I think Milos Forman was genuinely shattered by the failure of that film; it was almost like a tragic experience for him, from which he's never recovered. I think that he was really too subtle for his own good." [Time Out March, 97]

"It felt a bit like walking into a room and telling a joke which everyone had just stopped laughing at," remembers Firth. "Whether you tell it better or not, it's not going to work."

"Because my Valmont was not making boo-hiss faces, a lot of people didn't seem to think he was even a bad bloke. But Forman didn't want any hint of malevolence. It was a nightmare: 15 takes because he still thought that I was saying the line as if I had some evil plan. When I first saw Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, I had developed a taste for a much more subtle approach, so it all seemed a bit like Dallas, a pantomime of grotesque villains."

"I just thought, I'll see what happens when the film comes out. And, of course, fuck all happened. In Hollywood you don't wait to see if it's a flop. I dunno whether I was afraid of the place or was too pompous to go and grovel to them. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I think I was probably a bit self-protective, a bit frightened of the magnitude of the whole thing." [Premiere, April 97]