Directing is a really kind of amazing thing, because you're helping others and, in the middle of that, you have to worry about yourself.

Creating something is all about problem-solving.

There are characters in movies who I call 'film characters.' They don't exist in real life. They exist to play out a scenario. They can be in fantastic films, but they are not real characters; what happens to them is not lifelike.

I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately - like Joseph Campbell - that has made me realize that people in our cultural, especially in the liberal community, often go in search of a foe. It's like we always need a hill to climb up or something to push against, or we feel as if we're not working constructively in the world.

My mother's a staunch feminist, so I grew up with very strong feminist messages. As a result, I battled her in my teenage years because my image of being a man was a deformed one.

There's things that you don't want to do and they keep haunting you and following you. Bennett Miller directed this project [Capote], who is a friend of mine since I was 16, and Danny Futterman wrote it, and he's also been a friend of mine since I was 16.

When you think about [Truman] Capote in the - was what he did exploitative of a person's life or exploitative of these murders? You look at our culture now, you look at celebrity and how it plays out in our culture now, and Capote was one of the great PR men of his time.