I believe you make your day. You make your life. So much of it is all perception, and this is the form that I built for myself. I have to accept it and work within those compounds, and it's up to me.
I find all of my performances come down to mathematics in a sense - how do you approach the problem of this character? Sometimes I crack that problem, sometimes I don't.
Being married means I can break wind and eat ice cream in bed.
I was very curious about the world even at a young age, and I don't know at what point I became aware that other cultures believed in different religions, and my question was, 'Well, why don't they get to go to Heaven then?'
I didn't realize how interesting the place I come from is until I left home and saw how other cultures handled things differently.
When I first got out to Hollywood, they were pushing me for sitcoms, and I didn't really have an interest in them. I wanted to do films and slowly worked that way. And then it became, I guess, this curse of the leading man.
The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.
I always liked those moments of epiphany, when you have the next destination.
I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.
It's those difficult times that inform the next wonderful time, and it's a series of trade-offs, of events, of wins and losses.
Heartthrobs are a dime a dozen.
It's hard to be surprised by a film. It's hard to be surprised by another actor or by a director when you've seen enough and been around. So when I am, or when I forget that I'm watching someone's movie, or when I don't know how someone made a certain turn that I didn't expect . . . You know, I'm in.
I would say that the directors that I've liked the most are all curious in nature - curious thinkers. They're all big questioners, I would say, first and foremost.
Plan B is really a little garage band of three people, and our mandate has been to help get difficult material, that might not otherwise get made, to the screen and to work with directors we respect.
I'm actually very snobbish about directors. I have to say 'no' all the time. 'No' is the most powerful word in our business. You've got to protect yourself.
I guess I just don't see America as separate from Vietnam or Ethiopia. This mentality of 'our team's better than yours' - it's a high school idea. My kids don't see those dividing lines, and I don't want to either.
My training is documented on film.
Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings.
I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, and I just loved film. My folks would take us to the drive-in on summer nights, and we'd sit on the hood of the car. I just had this profound love for storytelling.
We sometimes let ourselves be rated too much by others - we put so much emphasis on a paycheck or what a magazine says.