If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars

My greatest hope is that we transcend the most fearful thing, which is that we are rapidly degrading the ecological systems on this planet that support everything we are doing and all life on it.

When I think about directing a film, the thing that stops me short is wondering if I'm a natural at it the way I think you, and PTA, and Fincher are born directors. Maybe some people's talent is in understanding the ways that film communicates, without dialogue, without plot.

I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.

I've never acted before in a movie I've directed. This felt like the time to do it just because the " Leaves of Grass" movie itself is so much of a platform for the lead actor. It's really written for an exciting performance and it really depends on the audience watching an extraordinary actor having a great time pulling off this feat. It makes sense to me as a director to act in support of that.

I'm a New Yorker, you know.

I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I'm never sure how to get started.