All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn't matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn't. There is something kind of refreshing about that.

Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.

I've worked with Neil Jordan, who I really adore. We did The Brave One [2007] together.

Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you. You have to be obsessed, you have to get up at 3 in the morning and go "Wait, I have an idea!" You have to continually be drawn over and over again to deepening inside that story, and ruminating over questions: "Why would he say this to her? Why if he was standing there, would she go?" Every one of those answers has to come from some personal place, and in order to do that, you can't sit on the surface. It's such a big change that you can't really explain it to anyone else.

There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.