Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.

Making art, being creative, is risky, especially for actors, but everybody on the set is being creative. You're putting yourself out there with ideas, and to have your brain be free of stress so that it can actually do its best work, it feels like you want to have a real sense of intimacy and connection and trust with everybody.

I'm drawn again and again to relationships between people who really, really want to connect and just can't get out of their own way to do it.

All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.

Flaws make us all human, and you're rooting for characters because of those flaws. It's ageless if you're interested in relationships and the way people can or can't relate to each other.

In the collaborative process, you create a real intimacy; everybody ends up sharing personal stories and personal observations and their philosophies, their psychological side. By the time you get to set, it just creates such a sense of trust and intimacy between the director and the actors. It's really, really great.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.