I buy myself a present whenever I don't get a role that I really wanted.

I grew up watching a lot of old movies, so getting to ask about making movies in the '70s and people he was friends with, like Orson Welles, Lillian Hellman and Charlie Chaplin, and hearing a first-person account was pretty incredible.

For me, each one of those experiences stands on its own. The first one was with Steven Spielberg, who helped me to get an agent and vouch for me, and that gave me the confidence to continue.

So many times you can't get a foot in the door unless you're already in the room.

I didn't read the script [ Rules Don't Apply ] for a couple years. It basically amounted to this kind of apprenticeship with Warren [Beatty]: conversations and learning about his whole background in the film industry and his life.

What's exciting to me now is the idea in participating in a landscape of moviemaking that's completely different - the way you can make a movie with a 5D or something and what's going to come out of that. Especially the generation under us who grew up with the internet. When they are making films in the next ten years, they're gonna be so different from what we've seen before because their whole worldview is so different.

[The Yellow Birds] is based on a novel written by Kevin Powers, who is an Iraq War vet. I play a soldier who promises my friend's mother I'm going to keep him alive. But when we go overseas to Iraq, he gets killed. It's about what happened to him, my reckoning and dealing with that as I return home from the war.