It feels like you're being invited into a kind of community [working with the Coen brothers].

I remember pretending to be the characters in the movies when I was a little kid.

I remember calling and asking, because I had a few lines that were like, "How could the character have done this?" and I hadn't read the part of the script that said what she [ Cate Blanchett] did, so they put me on the phone with Woody... Allen. I don't know if I could really say "Woody."

Some movies, I think, present ideas of the world that just don't help people with their lives. They just present things that are fleeting or stupid. So that's what I'm careful about - making sure I'm part of something that is saying something that I think is valuable in the world of people, not necessarily in the world of art.

I honesty feel that each film has its own particular challenges.

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.

Each time demands its own kind of film.