As an artist, you're always trying to reach a new height, do something new, try something you haven't done before, and push your boundaries.

As you get older and you hopefully battle your own demons, you find other reasons why you want to be an actor. The people that I truly admire do this because they love telling stories and they love the make-believe of the moment and not so much the gratification afterwards.

As an actor, I've always paid attention on sets. I've always watched, learned and listened, and you start to see things differently. You always leave yourself an out.

If you felt like you've done the best thing you could possibly ever do, it's probably time to hang up your spurs because there's not much else to do.

Having been an actor, I always want to leave room for the actors to find their comfort zone, so I don't like to be too rigid in how I plan my shots. It's different if you have weeks to rehearse and you can rehearse on your sets or in your locations and you can plan that out with your actors, but in modern independent filmmaking, you don't really have that time. You have to have a certain level of improvisation.

At a certain level, great actors who are successful actors don't have to worry about it. They can just go for it because they believe in themselves.

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.