You make yourself what you are. You have control of your own destiny.

I loved 'Saturday Night Fever' when I was a kid. I couldn't believe people talked that way. It was just a whole new culture I didn't understand. I snuck into it. It was an R-rated film. So it holds a special place.

I was hiding out from the celebrity thing, I was smoking way too much dope, I was sitting on the couch, and just turning into a doughnut, and I really got irritated with myself.

I had the luxury of working on the script with Andrew [Dominik] for a good year before the film started, so I was already intimate with the story [of The Assassination of Jesse James] and felt quite prepared walking into it.

I spent the '90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony.

The choice or decision to take on a film certainly isn't calculated as far as doing something that will be successful against something that will have a smaller audience. It's all a gamble to me, I don't bet on the horses; I just go with the story that speaks to me and that I feel strongly about which is this one [The Assassination of Jesse James].

Yeah. And it was too much of what you shouldn’t be doing instead of what you should be doing. I get enraged when people start telling other people how to live their lives. It drives me mental. This Prop.8 thing just drives me mental