I've definitely been spoilt. Every movie I've done, it's always the same criteria: finding a great story, and finding a great part to play.

I'm trying to make myself sound better.

Same with the Coen brothers and Warren [Beatty]. And then slowly you get to know each one of them as a person, and that becomes a kind of separate entity, where you just know the human being.

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.

[Woody Allen] does very few takes, and he doesn't give a whole ton of directions, although he does give direction.

Let's say [Warren Beatty] wants you to speak louder in a scene. He won't stop playing the role and say to you as a director, "Will you speak louder on the next take?" He'll say it as Howard Hughes: "I can't totally hear you. Why don't you speak up a little bit?" To kind of keep this rhythm going.

I grew up watching a lot of old movies, so getting to ask about making movies in the '70s and people he was friends with, like Orson Welles, Lillian Hellman and Charlie Chaplin, and hearing a first-person account was pretty incredible.