Sometimes we don't see certain things until we're ready to see them in a certain way.

I grew up on the golden age of children's TV.

Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.

I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another.

When people come together too young, they try to become one person. As you get older, you realize that you don't want to become one person because then you lose the person you are.

As an actor, if you step to the side and you look at [Thornton's performance] technically, and you try to imagine doing what he was doing, most people would panic. Most people would be on the set, and they would be panicking, going, "I'm not doing anything!" All the ham instincts in you would be screaming, "You've got to indicate something here." And it's beautiful, in a way. And so I appreciate, even as an audience member, the courage that it takes to be... frankly, to be subtle.

It must be good to be in Germany and France, because I have completely forgotten what it is like to be proud of your government.