I like the conscious manipulation that a great director can have. When you're both complicit in the manipulation of an emotion.

I think I find tactile things, you know. Just the feeling of blood itself is enough for me. If you, even if it's not real blood. I mean that's enough, like sometimes there are very simple things that are enough.

I love movies that are saying things that people might find odd at times. I don't find them odd at all. They give me comfort.

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.

Peter Sarsgaard, he's an extraordinary actor, and I would say that Peter has really brought into my life and my sister's life a sense of presence as an actor that I never really understood or knew about until I met him. They've been together for a very long time, and he introduced me to the idea of the presentation.

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.

Masculinity is, nowadays and generationally, confusing. What is honor, what is protection, what is being a man? It's evolving. But I believe having an open heart - and a strong mind to protect that - is the idea.