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.

Whenever you hear somebody else is auditioning for something, you sort of assume they're going to get it. You should try to just ignore it. I don't find it very helpful to know who else is going up for stuff, generally.

The biggest challenge to being an actor is when you're not working, just being unemployed, the downtime and not having anything to do.

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."

What's exciting to me now is the idea in participating in a landscape of moviemaking that's completely different - the way you can make a movie with a 5D or something and what's going to come out of that. Especially the generation under us who grew up with the internet. When they are making films in the next ten years, they're gonna be so different from what we've seen before because their whole worldview is so different.

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

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