To find a good story, you’re generally going to find it in independent or lower budget movies... I wouldn’t mind doing a big budget movie if it had a great story.

I try to research or make up for myself what happened in any character's life. From when he was born until the first page of the script. I fill in the blanks.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

You should always do the things in life that are both interesting and make you afraid.

In December of 2002, the late Richard Corliss, a respected movie critic with a long and illustrious career, wrote an embarrassing letter of support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in the guise of a Time magazine review of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers.

I met Cindy [Sheehan] near Crawford, Texas. I went out to personally thank her for waiting patiently by the road in front of George and Laura Bush's ranch for an answer from her President as to why and for what her son and others had been sacrificed in the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As regards Hillary C;inton's foreign policy actions and the powerful vested interests she seems gleefully beholden to, including all the biggest players in the military-industrial complex, I feel that she would be no better an actor on the world stage than Trump and whatever coalition of managers he might cobble together.