It's hard on an actor when you have to do a scene 45 times and you know damn well that three of the angles a director is shooting will never make it into the movie.

When a director makes a mistake, people suffer. People suffer horribly sometimes.

I got an agent. He said, what do you wanna do, and I said, I want an Oscar nomination. That's your job, that's what I'm paying you for. And I got it.

Making a mistake means overshooting a scene, shooting too many takes, for instance. Long after you've got it, you just keep shooting.

Our glorification of violence is ripping society apart. I don't want my children exposed to it.

Emotions are the natural result of striving for something. Every single scene has two or more people in it, and nobody wants the same thing, so they are negotiating this one way or another. The result of that negotiation will bring out all kinds of emotional stuff in you.

I'm drawn to a lot of first-time directors. One of the great common denominators in these small independent films is that there's a person, or two people, who have an absolutely monomaniacal passion to get these films made. That's what makes them happen. Sometimes, it takes years and years to finally get it done, but by never backing down, by never giving up, they get these films to the screen by hook or by crook.