You need those people to also have power and authority, and in a way that has been the story of my career.

[Warren Beatty] will sometimes spend hours on a very small detail to make sure he gets it right. After the kind of work that he's made, he certainly doesn't have to be doing that.

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.

By anyone's measure, [Warren Beatty] is proven himself. But he still sets out to make something as great as it possibly can be.

[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.

I've had that experience many, many, times - when you don't get roles. I'd developed a good muscle for shaking it off.

You do need these people to go out on a limb for you, thinking you're right for a role rather than having box office numbers.