I start from scratch with each movie; I wipe the slate and I certainly don't rely on some bag of acting tricks I've amassed over the years.

Directors go their whole career without being able to tell personal stories and to work with a cast as talented as they are.

You're creating a different world and the actor's job is to be able to convince the audience to enter into that world, whether it be actually something that you recognize from your own life or not.

It helps so much being on location. It's like the difference between performing for the rectangle of the camera versus a world being created and then the camera finds things within that. There's a huge difference in that, because what it takes away is performance. You don't feel like performing. You're just kind of doing it. You're existing.

When I imagined my life, I always thought I'd be in my mid-30s before I felt capable of marrying. But I suddenly found that I'd met somebody and I said, "Screw it. I'm not gonna sit here saying, 'Oh no, I'm not ready,' and regret not having done this later on and the possibility of not having this person around." I thought, I'll jump into it and we'll figure it out as we go along.

You get those occasional moments when you're absolutely calm, and you've just done something that would have scared you shitless earlier that day, and you've just done it like it was nothing. I find that very relaxing.

The risk element only came from acknowledging other people's attitudes toward it, and realizing that they considered it to be a risk for me to do.