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

That's something that Francis [Ford Coppola] would always say. I remember when I was doing Tetro, he said, "Stay innocent. I'm 69 years old, and I'm still innocent."

I'm an actor because I love movies, and always have loved movies. I'm a film buff. So, getting to work with those kinds of directors and getting to tell those stories is what I want to do.

Woody Allen is kind of the one example I don't have. Because the way he works and the amount of shooting time that I did on that film, I didn't really get to know him, so he kind of stays as "Woody Allen" to me.

Like I've known Francis [For Coppola] for so long I think, "Oh, Francis." And then you see his name on something with The Godfather, and you go, "Oh, yeah. He's also that." The person you knew of before you met the actual person.

There's a lot of complicated magical reasons why I'm not at the party that are too long and semantic to go into.

[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.