I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.