I could draw ideas. I remember writing a paper for a seminar class. I remember writing a paper about - and this is going to sound really sort of pretentious, but that's where my mind was at the time - how acting and the performing artist can really be like a Bodhisattva, how they can communicate ultimately an idea in a way that can move and shift things. And that was wonderful. I didn't know many classes where I could try and relate the thing that I really loved and wanted to do into an intellectual idea, and that happened to be one of them.

When you have the opportunity to choose projects, inevitably you start being moved towards the things that you're moved by, right? And that changes over time, as we change, right?

When somebody's really good, they're not just thinking about their job.

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.

As an actor, I feel like I'm somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don't want to hit it. I don't like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.

Sometimes you need an anchor, whatever it might be. You need a space to connect. So often you get into a way of doing things.

When I look at that now, all I think about is what a master [David Fincher] I was working with, and all of the things I could have watched and learned - and I didn't. And how, now, in my career, how I would love to have a ton of takes.