When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

I have so many really gifted friends, actors who I thought deserved as much as I did to get an agent or a job, or deserved more, and just never made it through somehow. I've always been really fiercely tethered to that. You know, I've been very lucky. All the filmmakers I've worked with have taken my desire to educate myself very seriously.

Every film, obviously, everyone starts out aiming at making it good, and in the end, filmmaking is really fragile. Making a film is like building a house of cards on the deck of a speeding boat, or playing chess on train tracks. Every opportunity feels like that; it's the one artistic field that's unlike most of the others.

Even the most humble role, I've always felt really wildly grateful to be getting anywhere in film business.

Self-promotion has never been a point, and I'm incredibly inept at self-promotion. Talking about myself is a little less inspiring than talking about the character.

A misfit like me getting anywhere in Hollywood as I somehow have, seemed, certainly at the time of 'Spanking The Monkey,' kind of out of reach, or not a very realistic take.

All the filmmakers I've worked with have taken my desire to educate myself very seriously.