I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

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.

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].

When I was about 16 or 17, I had a teacher who took a group of us to the National Theater in Washington, D.C., and I saw Ian McKellen do his one-man show - I think it was called Acting Shakespeare - and it completely bombed me; it put the zap on my brain in a big way.

What we set out to do with this movie [Leaves of Grass] was to create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions. A movie that could be poignant and funny, and suddenly quite violent. To have a character utterly sideswiped, and to learn that life is about balance.

Remarkably, there's no green screen in 'Leaves of Grass' movie. There is motion control. Technically, there were all sorts of challenges, but really the soul of it is Edward Norton talent. You write these characters when you write a movie, and all you can hope for or depend on is that your actors will elevate the material.

I never even considered comedy genre as something to embrace or move away from.