I'm very supportive of creative people being paid for the work that they do.

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.

You don't drink and smoke that much, and womanize that much, unless you really want to be punished, I think.

Every single word that's on the screen, I oversee. There's nothing that's shot, I'm not involved in. The scripts go through multiple drafts, and I work with the writers on all these things. And I'm extremely involved in the writing process.

The other thing - and writers can say whatever they want - is casting. You need to find a person who can inhabit that role, who can not sugarcoat the bad stuff, and not be too hard on the good stuff, but who can come across as a three-dimensional human being with some depth and some thought about what they're doing. When you find James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm, someone who can inhabit this role but still has a natural humanity to them, no matter what they're doing? It's a gift.

Identity is part of drama to me. Who am I, why am I behaving this way, and am I aware of it?

My major goal is to take my bathrobe off before the kids get home from school.