Sometimes we don't see certain things until we're ready to see them in a certain way.
The more you do your homework, the more you're free to be intuitive. But you've got to put the work in.
Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.
It's better for people to miss you than to have seen too much of you.
The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.
As we say in the sewer, if you're not prepared to go all the way, don't put your boots on in the first place.
When people come together too young, they try to become one person. As you get older, you realize that you don't want to become one person because then you lose the person you are.
I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.
I don't have anything to prove to anybody, which is a lovely place to be.
Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition.
At this point in my life I'm not bent on proving anything, really.
All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.
Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful.
I've observed over and over that people seem to get a much deeper sense of fulfillment out of something they've done as an act of service than out of the things they do for themselves.
Most people don't relate to and can't generate concern for something they don't encounter personally or feel personally affected by. People have to have the palpable negatives in their lives dissected for them in ways that let them understand the root causes of unhealthy, unhappy conditions in their lives and then be allowed to really see and feel the positive alternatives.
I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.
I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.
Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige, my friend.
Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.
It must be good to be in Germany and France, because I have completely forgotten what it is like to be proud of your government.
It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing.
You always end up getting involved in things because of, you know, the strange things your life brings you into contact with.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
You can't control everything that comes to you.
I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.
