I'm a New Yorker, you know.

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.

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.

Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.

But at the same time, the film industry just got torched. The risk tolerance for the types of movies we're talking about is lower, and the reason for that is that the captains of the industry were asleep at the switch when their core business was being disrupted. And they're never getting it back. In a way, it makes it all the more exciting when the good ones get through.

Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend.

On the downside, to paraphrase Thom Yorke talking about the music business, we're still having to deal with the stench of the last fart of the dying corpse of this regressive vision that America is a white, middle-aged, male, conservative country.