I'm kind of grateful that I didn't have any real success until I was older and basically out of high school. I think that was a real confidence boost for me, having it all start that way, in that very privileged position of having him vouch for me.

When Tetro came out, I met with Warren Beatty for the first time. I had, like, a four-and-a-half-hour lunch with him, and then over the next five years continued to meet with him and go to his house.

I think you always feel like you're about a hair's breadth away from being a bad actor anyway... It's not too hard to let the rope go slack, so to speak.

I've had a couple opportunities where I've been on the other side of the audition process as a director.

It's always been very important for me to be surrounded by people. It's never been enough for me to be successful alone. I want to be around people my own age who are also doing things I can learn from. And something Francis Ford Coppola said when we were doing the movie was, "If you learn something about people when you do dinner with them every week, you'll learn a lot more if you play softball with them every week." This is us learning what the climate is creatively among us.

[Howard Hughes ] approached filmmaking like he approached all of his inventiveness - it gave him an opportunity to make a name for himself in the world.

Even when Warren [Beatty] cast me, it had been two years between films at that point.