I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.

I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.

If you're with one person, then you don't have to meet other people. It's like when you're acting in a movie, you don't have to audition for other movies. I prefer that.

There's an economy in sports that I always think is a useful metaphor for acting. You have an objective. You're trying to win, and of course, you want to do well. You want to use good techniques so you enforce it, but also you don't do things you don't have to do. It's very economical, and I think that in acting the most economical way through a scene is always the best. It's active. There is the sense of the fight and you want to win.

Getting bad reviews or doing something thats not great is also really good for you as an actor. It also makes me feel as an actor that Ive earned my stripes a bit.

Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.

I was a ballet dancer. I did other kinds of dance but ballet was my great love. But then it became clear, when I was 12, that my body wasn't going to be right. That's always a heartbreaking moment because there's nothing you can do about that. Your body is just not right. You don't have enough turnout. You're not built properly.