That was cool, because they've all [ George Clooney and Josh Brolin and Scarlett Johansson] worked with the Coens. They were much more at ease with them at the outset, and they were all kind of familiar with the shorthand that the Coens had.

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 got turned down for a million jobs until I got my first movie with Francis [Ford Coppola].

Just getting to talk to that person [Woody Allen ] in real life was pretty wild.

So many times you can't get a foot in the door unless you're already in the room.

[The Coen brothers] hire the same people over and over again, so there's a shorthand between all of the people they're working with.

I remember Tetro was a big deal to me at that time. It was going from zero to one: Never having been in a movie, a person who had no relationship to any of that, and that was my first movie.