I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow.

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.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

A Separation is another film that I think is extraordinary, and one of those things that feels like it's from another planet, much like Terrence Malick's movies did: at a certain point, you feel like he's an alien from another planet telling us and looking at us and showing us how we are. I also really, really love Jerry McGuire.

Working with Robert, Robert [Elswit] is a storyteller. He's not a cinematographer, he's a storyteller. And to me, that's the graduation I hope to get to in my profession. That I'm not just an actor, I'm a storyteller. And I think that takes a long time in, when you have one job on a movie set. Makeup artists, actor, whatever. To graduate from just that to storyteller.

I'm a very political person, and I make political choices in my movies.