I get off on the interaction with people, and I love the chess of a movie and particularly - not only in preproduction or in production or postproduction - the behavioral chess. That is, learning and being humbled by and also teaching certain people certain things. I love that. As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

I love storytelling, you know, beyond anything. I love a great story beyond a great performance. Storytelling is about what we all do together and how we collaborate together. A performance can be a collaboration in ways, but oftentimes it's one individual thing.

I know exactly what that movie's [Brokeback mountain] about. I can't define it; it doesn't tie up in a perfect bow. But it's about adolescence. It's about what it feels like - this isn't meant as a criticism, but like things I didn't relate to, which were high school movies. Where I'd watch it and I'd be like, "Well, am I like the kid that nobody likes? Or am I like the person who everybody [likes]?" I couldn't [tell]. I was like quantifying, putting me in a box. "This is my personality at that age" and "I'm this kind of person" just felt like bullshit to me.

Every man goes through a period of thinking they're attracted to another guy.

As Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor. My sister [Maggie Gyllenhaal] came up to me recently after she saw this movie, Southpaw, the movie I did, and she thought there was this exploration of that type of presentation, and a bit of representation as well, if I could be totally honest, where she was deeply moved.

I like the idea of the adventurer's spirit. I think that is very much what a man searches for, in a certain way.

I was brought up, and my sister too, with two people who were always saying, "What you do is really nowhere near as important as the things that are going on in the world, and if your work needs to reflect that, or you want it to, then you need to strive for a certain type of excellence."