Frank Langellatells Dave Davies about what the film Robot and Frank made him think about:

I know I’m closer to the end than the beginning, so I’m trying to be far more conscious of any time wasted, which I still waste, as everybody does. But because it’s inevitable and because there’s nothing I can do about it, and I was taught at a fairly young age — not young enough, I wish I had learned earlier — that to waste any time on the inevitable or the thing you cannot control or fix is absolute nonsense. …

What the film has done for me is made me much more keenly aware — even though it’s a cliché these days that machines are taking over our lives — [it] made me much more keenly aware of how we all miss contact with each other.”

My career has been really very much like a Chekhov play, which is it just ebbs and flows and has no particular … It’s not like exposition, and then the plot turns, and then there’s a great big climax and then a denouement, it’s been wildly up and down. And I’ve liked it that way — great, great periods of enormous success, and then even sometimes greater periods where I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t get an agent even, where you just feel like somehow you’re not going to pull out of whatever the slump it is that you’re in.

— Frank Langella on the ups and downs of his acting career

What we tried to achieve was the notion of what’s going to happen to all of us in the near future — every one of us is going to go through aging and all sorts of processes, many people suffering from dementia. And if you put a machine in there to help, the notion of making it about love and buddyness and warmth is kind of scary in a way, because that’s what you should be doing with other human beings. So having the robot stay exactly as it always is and having Frank use it for nefarious purposes, I thought was wonderful.”

— Frank Langella on his character’s relationship with a robot in the film ‘Robot & Frank’