The country is so wounded, bleeding, and hurt right now. The country needs to be healed-it's not going to be healed from the top, politically. How are we going to heal? Art is the healing force.

Curiously, directing my own films have made me more tolerant and patient. I've always been an extremely impatient actor. Waiting around drove me nuts. But now I'm much more sympathetic to a director's struggle.

Criticism challenges current findings. The effort to defend one's position can lead to deeper insights or consideration of options previously not considered.

In 1973, I was shown a graphic of how dependent the United States was on nonrenewable resources like oil and coal and that little was being done to change that. It seemed irrefutable that we needed a change in direction or we'd be paying a huge price down the road. That's when I made a commitment to become a political activist.

I started as an actor in the theater playing a lot of character parts, and suddenly, I found myself in this place where it felt like I was getting locked into a kind of a stereotype, and it did bother me.

As a director, I wouldn't like me as an actor. As an actor, I wouldn't like me as a director.

I didn't think about politics until I came to Europe.