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.

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.

Let's say [Warren Beatty] wants you to speak louder in a scene. He won't stop playing the role and say to you as a director, "Will you speak louder on the next take?" He'll say it as Howard Hughes: "I can't totally hear you. Why don't you speak up a little bit?" To kind of keep this rhythm going.

For me, each one of those experiences stands on its own. The first one was with Steven Spielberg, who helped me to get an agent and vouch for me, and that gave me the confidence to continue.

I buy myself a present whenever I don't get a role that I really wanted.

I had four years of auditions, and nothing happened, until Francis Ford Coppola took a shot on me ['Tetro' in 2009]. I hadn't done a film, and suddenly I was the lead.

Woody Allen is kind of the one example I don't have. Because the way he works and the amount of shooting time that I did on that film, I didn't really get to know him, so he kind of stays as "Woody Allen" to me.