You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.

It's so hard for people to give up their cell phones or their ideas of being connected to everything all the time in order to get an immersive experience. That's the best way to make art. It's almost like you have to treat it like you're going into a submarine, and Noah Baumbach totally agrees with that. There's not a real other life that happens outside of the movie while it's being shot, which I like.

There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

As a kid, I was a big reader. Books and theater were the way I understood the world, and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.