I feel like everything I make is personal to me.

Chris Cooper I got to work with many times.

I feel like you only have so much time to make stuff. I'm definitely aware of that. I'm also excited about it.

I always aspire to that, where it feels like the film was made by the characters as opposed to the filmmakers. I try to be invisible.

I definitely enjoy getting to know people I find inspiring.

Finding a kid that could be introspective and internal and thoughtful, and then also be wild and free and guileless and physical, it was hard. So at the end we started getting down to panic time, and we still hadn't found our Max. And we decided to go about it a different way. We said, "Let's just find friends of ours that live in interesting cities in the country that maybe aren't as big, and people that don't do casting." And thinking maybe you find a place that has an artistic community, maybe we'll find some interesting kids from there.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out.