If someone doesn't want me, I'm not going to hang around and win them over.

My roommate in college in Austin, Texas, was Wes Anderson. Wes always wanted to be a director. I was an English major in college, and he got us to work on a screenplay together. And then, in working on the screenplay, he wanted my brother, Luke, and me to act in this thing. We did a short film that was kind of a first act of what became Bottle Rocket.

The Australian accent just a very lovely accent and it doesn't have the pretention maybe of an English accent, but yet seems a little bit more exotic than an American.

I lived in Rome for about five or six months during Life Aquatic.

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

And James L. Brooks then sort of became our mentor, brought us out to Los Angeles and worked on the script for a year with us. We learned so much working with him - just being able to spend time with him, the quality of his mind, the things he comes up with and says. I think Wes [Anderson] and I could go to dinner tonight and spend the whole dinner thinking and talking about things that Jim has said to us over the years.

I guess I was a little bit nervous, because there seemed to be so much secrecy with Ben [Stiller] wanting to make sure that it was a surprise when we walked out on the [Valentino] runway. I remember showing up at Place Vendôme and doing the fitting and seeing the pajamas that I was going to wear - which I like very much - and seeing Ben arrive kind of in disguise.