After Bottle Rocket, I started getting acting work. People started offering me roles in movies. It wasn't something that I thought about as a kid growing up in Texas. Actually, maybe I would have thought of it as a possibility, but it seemed so crazily far-fetched to think that you could work in movies that I really didn't ever quite imagine it. It was just lucky.

Movies I liked growing up were like Francis Ford Coppolla movies and Scorsese movies.

I think the way it works is that when you're casting a movie, you usually want to work with people that you believe in.

We worked together with Wes Anderson writing a couple more movies together: Rushmore [1998] and Tenenbaums.

Acting is more fun than writing. Writing is harder, more like having a term paper.

You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen, comedy actors are maybe juniors, and dramatic actors - they're the cool seniors.

That's the thing about friendship, it's a lot rarer than love, because there is nothing in it for any body.