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 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.

[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.

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.

The actors at that time had to learn all that stuff, it wasn't just hyperbole. What was appealing to me about being an actor at that time is that there was a home base, with job security. You were employed on a regular basis, and you had to sometimes do things you didn't want to do, but it was there. I also liked Hobie Doyle positivity.

Warren [Beatty] did a very cool thing, where he directs in character.

I talked to Woody Allen for half an hour or something. It was pretty incredible. He really went into lots of detail about the story [in Blue Jasmin] and what actually happened. Just talking to him is very surreal.