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

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'm trying to make myself sound better.

Each film and each character is a completely new set of challenges. It doesn't feel like you can rest on something you may have done well in the past.

When I worked with anybody like Woody Allen, there's the name, and your understanding of who they are before you meet them, that stays in your head a little bit.

Warren [Beatty] did a very cool thing, where he directs in character.