I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.

I did play a dentist in Waiting for Guffman. I wrote the speech at the conference. In the original script, when it got to that scene, it was, 'Thank you very much. Good night.' Literally. I just thought, 'He keeps talking about this speech. The keynote address is the big thing in his life and this is too important to say, "Thank you. Good night." I think we have to see and hear him doing what he does.' So I got together with my dentist and we worked through a few things.

You just let people do what they do and look at them and give them enough rope until they do what you thought they were going to do... which is screw you over.

But Medicine is a demonstrative Science, and all its processes should be proved by established principles, and be based on positive inductions. That the proceedings of Medicine are not of this character, in to be attributed to the manner of its cultivation, and not to the nature of the Science itself.

I grew up in the South with guns everywhere and we never shot anyone. This [shooting] is about people who aren't taught the value of life.

What I remember from [the first meeting with Samuel L. Jackson] was that he was a friendly, animated kind of guy. His screen image is a hard boiled intimidating kind of character. That's what I remembered thinking, 'Boy, this guy seems like a normal guy.'

I love to play real people... good people that I know the audience will get behind. It's the good people in the world that I gravitate to.