I like that when you create you really do create with a very small group of people, and in that space, before it goes out to all these people, that's what I love.

I think that I have done work where I feel like I've challenged myself, and then what's even more confusing is I've done work where I think I've challenged myself and no one's responded to it, and no one's interested in it.

I've become obsessed with learning other languages in movies, because I was like, since I was like, but I learned how to box so why don't I just learn another language for a movie?

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 try and find and access the parts of myself that still blindly believe and have faith in a lot of things. I don't mean to be cynical, but I've also discovered that I still have a lot of those. And they may not be where I expected them to be. Maybe I've been in relationships, and this is a movie about relationships, like romance relationships - so maybe I've been in some that have sort of made me lose my faith. But deep down inside, I still have blind faith.

I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don't think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody's struggle. No matter what it is.

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.