I've had to deal, a lot, with my own sense of intimidation at meeting famous people - especially actors, but really any famous people.

Scary is time passing and sickness and dying and regret and isolation and loneliness and relationship problems - as opposed to a guy in a hockey mask, which didn't seem that scary.

I have a lot of anxiety about medical things for example. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I'd had the practice when I went into shooting Synecdoche. It can be somewhat gratifying, too, because I don't have that relationship with other adults where I need to comfort them or they come to me for that.

I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

I hate a movie that will end by telling you that the first thing you should do is learn to love yourself. That is so insulting and condescending, and so meaningless. My characters don't learn to love each other or themselves.

You get a kind of surreal feeling and also it allows you to focus on the things we want you to focus on in a new way - the stuff that's very small and mundane that happens in a person's life when they're in a hotel room. There's more interest because you're seeing a puppet do things that you're very familiar with that you might not notice if it was a human doing it.