For some reason, when I was in junior high school, my friends and I had, like, a cologne-stealing ring.

If liking Katy Perry and drinking margaritas is gay, then who wants to be straight?!

If you just read the book, you're taking in the narrative, you're taking in the characters, you're understanding it in a certain way. If you make a movie it's really an act of translation.

When I was younger, I thought, 'Ok, I'm supposed to do this project because it'll help my career,' but that didn't work because I ended up doing movies that I worked really hard on but I didn't really like and they didn't turn out well, so it was like I lost double. Once I just started working with people and projects I believed in, everything changed and I suddenly had a career that I loved and that I was proud of.

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.

As an actor in the classroom, you're revealing so much, and teachers are, you know, they're just critiquing like a painting or a piece of work; it's like, it's you, and it's your emotions that they're working with.

School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.