I learned from my parents the idea that, if you are devoted enough and you want to study something enough, you can really teach yourself anything.

If you came from the future and you arrived here, what would you be like? Would your immune system be depressed from that travel? Would you be well? Would you be ill? Would you be affected by micro-organisms of the time period and be hiding out in a basement? How would it all work, practically?

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

If you play it safe every time, then you're missing the best part of acting. You haven't learned anything about your humanity.

When you're reading Chekov, you're in this world that he's created. I never would have created that world. I don't know anything about that time period or that setting or those groups of people or what those experiences were, but oh my gosh, it's amazing to daydream on it and put yourself there.

I think one thing for sure that you learn the more films that you make is how important it is to choose your collaborators.

What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting.