Even my wife and two of my children are in "Leaves of Grass". Because I love the source material so much, it was really easy to write and an utter delight to get to direct because I had people like Edward [Norton] elevating the material and surprising me in their interpretations of all of this stuff that's so close to me.

If two people are at completely different stages in their spiritual life, that can present a real problem.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

When I look at the directors that I really love, who really develop their films over time, they're almost always the ones who go back again and again and again at the same investigations. I think that when somebody has a theme they go after, it's fun to service that. It's like, "I know you now. I know what you go at." It helps you locate yourself a little bit quicker in their world.

If you feel like someone just knows what this is about to their core, they're going to have that special confidence in it.You stop looking at the seams and they start inhabiting the same space and start interacting with each .

Most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them.

No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.