I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.

I'm always surprised when people say, "Oh, it got such mixed reviews." I guess I didn't read them.

For me, the motivation really was to work with Al Pacino. To me, that seemed like an incredible opportunity, just a learning opportunity because I thought so highly of him.

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

Sometimes I think candor is the only kindness.

In the theater, actors are the essential element of the work. In a film, it's a real collaboration - not that theater isn't, because it is - but it's a collaboration to such an extent that you can give a performance in film that sometimes you look at and you go, "Well, that's not the performance I was trying to give at all."

You want to move into worlds you've never been in before. It would be like going to the same restaurant all the time or going to the same place for vacation all the time. Where is the adventure in that?