Graduates, I'm asking each of you, at some point, to act up, be misbehaved. Buck the system. Fight for what you believe in. This is the time to do it. You're the ones to do it. Your world, is like no other generation, you actually get to create the world that you can imagine.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

Trying to find the story within the story was hard. Filmmaking is such a reductive process in a strange way and you keep whittling away to what is essential.

I haven't had such an overwhelmingly positive response as I have from The Normal Heart directly to me. And it's a blessing. If this is it, if I have a piano dropped on me tomorrow, then I would go down thinking, 'You know what, I did okay as far as my career goes, because that's a gift. That's rare.'

I have a carpool with a corrections officer and a construction worker. My kids get to see that we're not segregated based on wealth or standing. It's very cool.

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food.

That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people.