Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.

But I don't want to die! I have so much to do!

I view filmmaking as a director's medium.

I was being generous. Gia Coppola wasn't even a filmmaker at that time, but I asked her to do it, because I believed in her as an artist. And because I wanted a woman's take on the material. The book Palo Alto is very male-centric, but Gia carved out a bunch of the female characters, and brought them to the fore in the movie. And the project was richer for it.

Life as a performance is just a way to look at life choices as character choices. Every morning you choose what to wear, you choose how to wear your hair, you choose your friends, you more or less choose your profession, and how hard you will work at it. Those are all things that an actor decides about his character when he is performing, and they are things that we decide in life. We create our "character."

When I was a young actor, I just didn’t understand how to function in this business as an artist. It is a business, it’s called the film business for a reason, there’s money involved ... But on the flip side, now I do not let the business side of it rule either. It’s a balance.

I start movies with people that I believe in and people with visions, you know, that I believe in. And so if it doesn't kind of come together in the right way, at least I was doing it because I believed in the person and the movie.