With Edward Norton you’d never say, “This is the one we’re going with whether you like it or not.” It has to be agreed upon.
I had a huge advantage with Edward Norton because he’s directed a movie before, so one thing he appreciates is how hard my job is, he’s very sensitive to that. We actually ended up finishing “Leaves of Grass” a day early.
Screenplays aren’t written to be read, they’re written to be made into movies.
When you have a pipe salesman with a business called Macabee Pipes, I’d say you’ve got your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.
I hear about actors being exterior actors and actors being instinctual actors and I always think it’s crap. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that good actors do both – they do inside-outward and they do outside-inward. You can’t not do both.
I think the consensus among our generation and people younger than us is that we do have a defining challenge in the moment, so I do like being involved in something bigger than the finger-doodling I do in art. It stimulates your brain in certain ways.
I thought Rounders was a comic movie in its way. First time I directed a movie, I wanted to do a comedy. I don’t like things that are superficially one thing or another, mainly. My favorite comedies are really smart, too, and have a lot of levels to them as well.
I knew Danny DeVito and he knew me, so he wanted me to try Death to Smoochy. I loved that stuff and had a great time doing it.
You can do things in twin scenes now you couldn’t before. You can implement actual moving cameras.
But work that’s got real substance does make people feel, “There’s someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better.” And I think that’s still got enormous value.
The thing I’m absolutely convinced of, no matter how crazy – technological the world is getting, is that people feel more connected through the good works. Entertainment, and the sort of soporific effect it has on people and their stress, is one thing.
If you try to make interesting films, you’re going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way.
I’m not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I’m never sure how to get started.
There’s a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.
I think technology is having a democratising effect on film.
Most of the movies that I’ve made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I’m not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them.
I’m pretty busy in my life and I’m very aware of what it takes to direct a movie. It takes a lot out of you; it takes a lot out of the rest of your life, from other people in your life. I don’t lie around hungering for that consumption very often.
I start to get fixated on a story and a character and an idea, and at a certain point, I really want to do it. It’s a compulsion to explore a specific thing, as opposed to a compulsion to direct, generally speaking.
See, I don’t get the sense that you need to direct at all. Sometimes I get the opposite sensation from you, that you’re like, “I really should go do something else.” But then you are drawn back in by a particular story, like a hangnail in the brain.
There is a lot of interesting product coming to market already. Bags and bottles and cups and such made of potato starch and other fully biodegradable materials. In some sense, plastic is more chemically complex. We ought to be able to simplify.