My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.

I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.

Satire is meant to have teeth; satire is meant to be dangerous. But it also happens to be fun because subversion and telling the right kind of people to go to hell is supposed to feel good.

I just love the process of working with other actors. It's like jamming with a musician, except it takes a little more effort to get to that place as an actor, because you have the cameras and lights and everything. But I love jamming with these people.

Get your sense of outrage back, and your sense of defiance and spirit back, and try to put these pieces together and confront the excesses of empire at every turn.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.