I needed to change my name just to liberate myself and find out I could do it without walking into a Hollywood casting office with the name Coppola.

I do tend to apply myself to projects that make me uncomfortable because usually when that happens I try to find a way of existing in the project that is more creative.

I haven't isolated myself. I am not living on a yacht somewhere. I am not tucked away or behind a gate somewhere. I am not flying on a private plane. I am going to the airport, I am with people, some of the interactions are good, some of them are not so good, but it keeps me in touch with being, you know, part of society.

Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

I believe that everybody has the right to believe what they want to believe and to knock somebody's faith and religion is foolish, whatever it may be - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism.

It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy, you know. Killers, even.

I went to New Orleans for the first time for Wild at Heart, and I kept going back to make more movies there. I've become very close to the city and part of me does feel like a New Orleanian.