The first role I ever played I had the lead and it's pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am. There are a lot of short parts I could play, but I only do them when they are like this ("A Few Good Men"), central to the idea of the movie.

I don't want to direct a movie as good as Antonioni, or Kubrick, or Polanski, or whoever. I want it to be my own. I think I've got the seed of it and, what's more, that I can make movies that are different and informed by my taste.

Children give your life a resonance that it can't have without them.

Almost everybody's happy to be a fool for love.

I've always understood money; it's not a big mystical thing to me.

If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.

I love writing, but I stopped because I felt I was more effective approaching filmmaking from a different vantage point.