Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.

When somebody on a professional scale says "you did it wrong," it has a pretty intense impact. If you don't have some kind of opposing force to say, "that's all right, that's their opinion," or, "I may have screwed that one up but I'll do better the next time," then you're screwed.

I have never indulged our society's misguided notion that my personal life is relevant to my work, so any reporting surrounding that is necessarily hearsay, speculation or fantasy.

I don't want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.

I don't think actors should have to do anything but come in and act.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

When you're in pajamas that are sagging in the ass because you've got a battery pack that's weighing them down, and covered in 2,000 LEDs, and your face has 150 black dots on it, and you're probably standing in six-inch heels, it is a big challenge to imagine that you're the master of the universe when the rest of your cast members are laughing their ass off at you. So there's no question that there was a very difficult task that I had, but it wasn't living up to somebody else's expectations of the story. I was just trying to do the screenplay that was written.