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

When I worked with anybody like Woody Allen, there's the name, and your understanding of who they are before you meet them, that stays in your head a little bit.

I auditioned for four or five years and didn't get anything after that.

[The Coen brothers] hire the same people over and over again, so there's a shorthand between all of the people they're working with.

Somebody comes to your house. You know they're coming, so it's not a surprise. And they give you an envelope that has your scenes in it. And they sit in the car outside for a half an hour while you read your scenes, then they ring your doorbell and you give your scenes back. Then you shoot the movie a few weeks later or something. The next time you see your scenes is the night before you start shooting. I never read the script [Blue Jasmine], so I didn't really know what it was about.

When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers films and westerns and stuff like that. Thats where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure.

That was cool, because they've all [ George Clooney and Josh Brolin and Scarlett Johansson] worked with the Coens. They were much more at ease with them at the outset, and they were all kind of familiar with the shorthand that the Coens had.