I've never known a situation in my career where a terrible script turned into a movie that was out of this world or was a success.

When I was doing 'This Boy's Life' I wanted to be as old as Robert DeNiro and as experienced as him and have the same respect as he did in that movie.

I want to be the perfect child. I owe so much to my parents and the way I was brought up.

You can make history, or you will be vilified by it.

I like movies! No, I like theater too. And paintings are great, and all of that! But to me, the great sort of artistic medium I think, of our time, is film. I really feel that. I mean to me, there's nothing else out there, where I can sort of suspend disbelief for two hours.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story

At first glance, you read something on the page and it can seem one way, and you can have your decisions before you wind up on set about what that set is supposed to mean, but until you're actually there doing them, there's really no way to understand it.