Tell me about working on your new film, “A Late Quartet.”

String instruments are particularly difficult to simulate. It’s not like playing a trumpet, or sitting at a piano, when they can fake it. Both hands are involved, and body movements. We had to take lessons — a lot of lessons — and I had a cello that I practiced every day. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Catherine Keener became quite good, but I had a more difficult time. I didn’t get very good.

Can you play a basic song, like “Hot Cross Buns”?

No, I couldn’t play really anything.

Had you played any instruments before?

No. When I was a kid my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It’s hard to keep going when you don’t get any better.

And that’s one of the themes of the movie — the obsessive dedication that’s required to be a musician.

I’m that way about learning a script. I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that’s about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time — make a chicken or slice vegetables — and all day long I just read it over and over and over.

How do you run lines and cook a chicken at the same time?

It’s the power of distraction. My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.