Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

I teach a lot - I teach at the UCLA and USC graduate film programs - and a lot of those projects are my students' projects that I act in or I do a cameo.

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.

The selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, 'Hello, this is me.'

Almost all the movies I've directed are adaptations. And I think what I found when I went to film school, where they try to push you to find your voice or your thing, is that I got a lot of things out of adaptations.

In any creative endeavor, you do have to sort of take your shots. Nobody is going to beg you to go into the creative arts. So, if you want to pursue a career in something like acting or writing, the motor and the drive have to come from you. And that does take courage because, A, a lot of people want to do it, and B, it's hard. So, you have to have the guts to put yourself out there and go for it in spite of the world saying, "You know, it would be so much easier, if you didn't pursue this." So, it does take guts.