I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

It's wonderful to actually have an opportunity to get real and show how complicated and fascinating sex is.

Very, very often in movie sex you see this fiction about unity. A union. That somehow these two thinking beings become one, and there's one action and they're sort of perfectly in sync, and the lighting's perfect, and they've got their eyes closed, and they're gone, you know? And then you cut to someone having a cigarette. And it's all so much Novocain. Meanwhile, those of us us watching it are going "I'm never going to tell anybody, but I never have sex like that".

The whole thing of working in collaboration with filmmakers is the thing that I love the most, and possibly the thing I do the best.

The people I'm working with tend to be people I know, who are my friends, and I like hanging out with them. There's nothing better than making a long-term project with your friends. It's just dreamy.

Faith is in the eye of the beholder.