When you're playing someone who has a strong ego about themselves, you can't play them when you have the opposite opinion of the one they have of themselves.

In Smooth Talk it was a much more intuitive search - I was only 17 at the time, and I wasn't aware, as women are when they get a little older, that there's always a side of a woman that likes a man from the other side of the tracks. We all have an attraction to what's different from us.

I'm very connected to my own family, and maybe I like to explore the feelings that come up in families. I'm fortunate that my parents taught me to look further into why I might feel a certain way; it was normal to expose things.

Unfortunately, overall, movies are a conglomerate. People buy and sell people in this business, which can get really ugly.

I would say Steven Spielberg is family to me. He's a genius. We survived a hurricane together. I ran from half-puppet,half-nothing creatures. It was months of our life as family. It was the wildest film, Jurassic Park, I'd ever worked on that way.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is one of the greatest films of all time.

There's something so accessible about heroes who have faults.