When I was 14 years old, I was by no means trying to work professionally at all.

[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.

For me, it was watching 'Reds' and 'Splendor in the Grass.' To me, 'Splendor' is like the companion piece to 'Rules Don't Apply.' It's set in the time when Warren [Beatty] came to Hollywood, and when he did that first film.

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

[Warren Beatty] will sometimes spend hours on a very small detail to make sure he gets it right. After the kind of work that he's made, he certainly doesn't have to be doing that.

When you work for the Coens, they are so fun and so organized. They treat everyone with such respect. And the character I got to play was so fun.

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