'W.' is not necessarily a political film, but it was sort of a contrasting reality for me to get into George W. Bush as a character because of how I felt about his administration before I started making the film.

My craziest on-set story comes from during the Goonies, when I came up to Spielberg and said that I wanted to climb the walls of the tunnels and that it represented my mother's womb, for some odd reason. I was reading Stanislawski at the time and Spielberg's response was "Why don't you just act."

When the AIDS epidemic first started there were people who said, "Well, if there weren't gays, then we wouldn't have this problem. It's got to be because of them - let it be them instead of us." But when you educate yourself about it, you can't help but realize that we're all affected by it. I think that things like that just become too daunting for people.

When accepting or preparing for a role, fear is the motivating factor.

You've got this guy who refuses to die for some reason whether it be a physical or metaphysical reason or spiritual reason so you can do anything. You can kill off anybody and you can still bring them back because he's kind of half there and half in reality, you know?

When I was in jail I could only think about what the average person has to go through - the person who has no power to go to the press or no money to hire a lawyer.

I do think, from the other side, that George W. ush was somewhat of an innocent in his thinking about what Ronald Reagan did during the Cold War and by bringing democracy to Eastern Europe. I think he believed that he could do the same thing by bringing democracy - or Midland, Texas, really - to the Middle East. I truly think he felt it was possible. "I want to do for the Middle East what Reagan did for the Soviet Union."