I usually play characters that are a lot different than me. I mean, I'm never in a fight in a movie and if I'm in them, I'm usually losing.

The better the actor, the less you know about his life. I mean, nobody's better than De Niro and you don't know anything about him, right?

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.

As somebody who makes his living in the movie business and wants to contribute to it, I think that the best chance I have of doing that is just consistently working with great directors.

People do things in the names of good, and in the name of ideals, but the world isn't that simple. So they end up doing things that aren't necessarily good. Even if they think they're doing the right thing, but when viewed from a different perspective they can look barbaric and crazy.

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.

If you work at something, you get better at it.