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.

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.

This place [USA] is exploding with young people who are - they're like Nietzsche's hammer - going to break everything and make something better. The creative energy in this country, and what people are coming up with is very hopeful.

Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful.

To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there's a cinematographer, there're costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?