I always did plays in school because I thought it was fun, but it just never occurred to me as a thing to do.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

There are some directors who don't like the set much. They like post-production, where you have all the ingredients in the can - you've got all the footage, all the music, the various effects - and then you have to do the alchemy necessary to make it all good, a long and very key process of putting everything together and making it into the cogent thing that you want.

In general, I'm always interested in characters who have kind of extreme aspects to them, who are in some ways larger than typical people.

I'd always admired Diane Keaton, but I'd never met her.

It probably goes without saying that I enjoy the potato pancakes, delicious hams and so forth that maddeningly turn up at this time of year.

I've always thought that, in a sense, the more specific and sometimes even the smaller the world of a movie is, the more universal it is.