I wasn't really quite sure where Heath Ledger came from, and I think that's the feeling most people got when they were around him and why he was so extraordinary.

They're the darkest people I know, comedians.

I remember Chris Cooper saying to me - I was doing October Sky with him - and he said, "You know, you're just yelling at me." He's like, "You're just yelling. You need to listen." We were in a fight, and you know, oh you'd get so excited as an actor, you're like, "We have a fight, oh, I get to get mad." And he just said, "You need to listen." And I started listening - and then all of a sudden where I was listening was where, I don't know, anger became something else.

The amount of preparation I saw from someone like [David] Fincher, and how aware he is of everybody else's job on the set, and how much respect he has for every aspect of the film, and every aspect of the frame - that's the type of actor I am now; it's not the type of actor I was then. But without understanding his process, and then coming to learn it later on, I would never be the actor I am now.

I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart.

I had not spent a ton of time around animals as a kid.

I have an overactive brain, and as a result of that, I can really get in my own mind. So I like to try and exercise it to the point of exhaustion.