I was very inspired by Peter Mullan's film about those kinds of places where you put people who'd been bad.

When I was thirteen, I had a nervous breakdown, and I was put into this grown-up mental hospital with all these 50-, 60-year-old men and women. This big, Victorian mental house. There were like five boys in there, all my age, looked after by this woman who was 22 or 23. And it was like "Empire of the Sun" meets "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"-type of arrangement where you've got this young boy overcoming and becoming heroic in the face of this awful place.

As I found out making this last movie ["Method"], if you ever do things in an unusual, different way, you got to fight because there's no way people will let you.

I just absolutely go for it when somebody says, "No, you can't have this." That's why I spent my entire life sucking off straight men. "Okay, so you think you're straight, do you? We'll see about that."

Writers and filmmakers have this age-old relationship to the material.

I know I'm part of the changing process of the way we look at things.

I did make some money, the first money that I ever made, doing this last one, and it's an extraordinary feeling just being given the freedom to do something.