I read "Milk" and immediately I was very emotional after reading it and then I saw the documentary - the one that Rob Epstein did - and I said that's it. I saw it with my daughter and that was it. This thing is a different thing. It's like I've been offered these kind of superhero movies or "Terminator" or whatever those movies are and I just go ahh.

I know that, for me, working with people like Robert Rodriguez and Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers and Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant was so much easier than working with a lot of the people I had worked with before, because with these guys, there's not a lot of ego involved. It's all about the work. It's all about how to make the story better. So at the end of the day, you feel a trust that you usually don't feel - or at least I haven't felt in the past with most people.

Fear - there's always fear. You re-create yourself in every movie, don't you?

I covered my face because they had taken my wisdom teeth out.

Back then they had Elvis and they thought Elvis was so risqué. So everyone has their perception to what innocence is.

I'm really, really lucky. I was given my dad's good genes.

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."