You can only really judge yourself in comparison to other people. How bad you are, but you're not as bad as someone else. So it's degrees of losing.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

The situation in the film is like me going out to Venice Beach and talking to a homeless guy on the boardwalk, and 13 years later he's the president.

Usually I play people who just keep babbling on and on and on.

I always liked it when people go back in time to discover things about themselves, like with 'A Christmas Carol' and you're getting a tour of your life by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.

If you're a movie star, there's a cycle you go through: adoration, adulation, you're used, and then you're discarded. And it happens again and again, always in that sequence.