Francis [Ford Coppola] was on the cover of Time Magazine for One From The Heart and for owning a studio, and he was fresh off of Apocalypse [Now] and The Godfather films, so he was at the absolute top of his game and legend [in The Outsiders ].

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

Some of the '80s movies I did are sort of museum pieces. St. Elmo's Fire is great as a sort of kitschy, "Oh, my god, I can't believe we wore that" type of movie.

['John F. Kennedy] movie is based on a massive best-selling book, which is always helpful. And then the script was amazing and answered my question, "Why this? Why now?" And the "why now" is that it's 50 years since the assassination, and the country needs to have and will have a conversation about that. And the "why this" is the construct, which I think is sort of ingenious.

Sam Seaborn is the best character that's ever been written for me, certainly. By far. And it's a timeless show [The West Wing], one that's having another resurgence now, with people so in an uproar politically.

[Bad Influence]was David Koepp's first big screenplay. It was actually a writing sample that was around town to get David work at the time, and Steve Tisch - now the owner of the New York Giants - found it, loved it, and together we put it together. But I'd say that would be the one I'd tell people to go and look at if they haven't seen it.

What people do in their private lives is their business, and shouldn't be anybody else's business.