When you have a pipe salesman with a business called Macabee Pipes, I'd say you've got your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

I'm an actor, and, beyond that, the thing I do most compulsively is writing. So I come at it very much from this sense of character. I get interested in people. And I feel confident in my capacity to absorb and manifest the characteristics of people. I have a real auditory hang-up for dialogue; re-creating the way people talk really is an addiction in my brain.

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 .

You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me.

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.