I had a great time working with Denis [Villeneuve] and the whole group. It was a very different kind of a part [in Story of Your Life] than I've played in a while. But I had great fun; and yes, it was really nice not to have to answer to anybody about that.

I love Seth Rogen's line in which he talks about how you can be both a genius and decent at the same time.

I have making a new film called Story of Your Life, directed by Denis Villeneuve, with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Which is about aliens coming to the earth and observing us and us trying to find a way to communicate with them.

Most of the people in New York are very often from somewhere else.

To see those two characters [Steve Jobs and Andy Hertzfeld ] juxtaposed against each other shows an interesting dynamic of how gifted people might function differently in the world.

I play Edward G. Robinson [in Trumbo], who was a close friend and a co-worker of Dalton's [Trumbo]. They worked together on at least one or two screenplays. A lot of these stories take famous people and show you who they are behind the scenes, which is kind of fun. One of the things about getting to play Edward G. Robinson was learning who the man was away from his movie-star exterior.

I was raised in a reform synagogue. I think we all bring with us a sense of when hard things happen to us, we find ourselves asking questions of why are these things happening to me at this time in my life. I think in that sense, there's a certain resonance that I carry. It's more of a spiritual resonance as opposed to particularly of Judaism.