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.

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 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.

[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.

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

Warren [Beatty] loves to talk about his experiences with [Elia] Kazan.

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.