When you work with a great director, you can have a great partnership.

If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.

I have a sort of a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things

I find I'm waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it's like a book every two weeks. But I read every day.

Oliver Stone will never be happy with the first take. He wants more than that. When you’re delivering your lines, he’ll stop you and tell you some kind of riddle about the character and you have to go away and figure that out. If you’re hoping for him to give you all the answers, then you’re in for a long day.

My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.

If at age 10 I say there are monsters in the basement and they don't believe it, I would have stayed in that house. My father would have said "Shut up and get to your room." So I thought the only sanctioned tyranny in the world is parenthood and everybody goes "Yeah." It's a dictatorship - parenthood.