You hope and pray that you'll get involved with a director that you understand and who has the same sensibility as you do and knows how to push you and bring out the best in you.

If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.

And if I was going to go there – the only person you can really compare Batman to, of those characters, would be Iron Man, another rich guy who has the ability to make fantastic toys – so if you want to take Batman and Iron Man and put them in a battle, that’s an interesting battle. But if you want to take Christian Bale and Robert Downey Jr. and put them in a UFC fighting cage, Christian Bale will – to quote Full Metal Jacket – tear Robert Downey Jr.’s head off and sh-t down his neck.

So the thing that's beautiful about the Rolleiflex is that I open the camera up from the top and put my face in and that the camera's all about composition and all about light.

Stanley didn't shy away from true humanity or from the ugliness that all people are capable of.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.