For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.