It's very frustrating [ to work under director's control], not just because you're getting rejected constantly, but also because you're at a time in your life where you have an enormous amount of creative energy, and there's no way to express it. That's why a lot of people get into drinking or drugs or whatever.

There are people who appear in the magazines and I don't know who they are. I've never seen anything they've done and their careers are over already. They're famous for maybe 10 minutes. Real careers, I think, take a long time to unfold.

There are people who just collect a bunch of footage and then edit it later. You definitely feel more protected when a director is moving on when you've actually felt something happen and you know they're watching intently.

He's famous for being obsessive about details.

All parents are trying to balance. Look, I'm lucky in the sense that I can control my hours. I can choose my jobs, and not everybody has that choice. But I definitely, it's a family decision every time I take a job.

Part of the American ethos is that you want to leave something better for your kids than you had and I know that my parents felt that way and I know that my grandparents felt that way and everybody worked hard so that their kids had a better chance. I just don't want to be the first generation that doesn't do that.

And you know, we were talking about American identity, and where we've come from and where we are and where we're headed. We knew that we wanted to have a hopeful ending and we wanted it to be pro-community, and a pro-democracy type of movie.