I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.

My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much success without a certain amount of compromise.

I find that it's a very odd thing to think of competition when you're talking about what I still think of as art. I don't think of competing with actors or filmmakers at all. You do compete, in a way, at the box office, but we're far enough apart when both films are coming out that I'm not concerned with that either.

We try to make films for people [that are] the films that we'd like to see. They're not easy to get made. They're hard to get made. You have to keep the budget low to get them made. But at the end of the day, I don't really worry about competition, because I don't really think of it that way. I don't feel like I'm in a race with anybody.

I'm not out trying to prove anything. I'm sort of finished with that, so I get to play in other sandboxes and try and figure out what I like and I'm interested in.

When you start out as an actor, you read a script thinking of it at its best. But that's not usually the case in general, and usually what you have to do is you have to read a script and think of it at its worst. You read it going, "OK, how bad could this be?" first and foremost. You cannot make a good film out of a bad script. You can make a bad film out of a good script, but you can't make a good film out of a bad script.

Most of the films I've done haven't done particularly well. I'm surprised I'm continuing to work.