You have all the influence you choose to have.
I try not to plan that too much.
I think you gotta have an honesty and a humility about human nature and that it’s not about you at the end of the day.
My ideal weight is 205, actually.
To act well isn’t an easy thing.
Well, in the theater, I think you’re actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.
Plays never feel like the right thing to do at the time.
Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.
When you’re playing someone who really lived, you carry a burden, a burden to be accurate. But it’s one that you have to let go of ultimately.
Acting’s difficult for me because I think you have to be passionately involved in what you’re doing.
I didn’t have any idea that I would be able to have a career in film.
Directing is a really kind of amazing thing, because you’re helping others and, in the middle of that, you have to worry about yourself.
Film’s hard when you don’t have any relationship with the director at all and you just show up. Then you really are just a gun for hire.
There are a lot of things going on with my life right now that don’t just have to do with career. So I have a hard time making decisions about work. That’s really a luxury problem.
I work constantly but I work at a lot of different things. You know, I run a theater company in New York, I direct plays, act in plays, in movies, so I try to keep it eclectic.
Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.
I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they’re beautiful and famous and rich. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’d be dead.’
I didn’t really buy LPs or go to concerts.
You know the circus performer who spins the plates in the air you know, and he’ll spin six or seven plates in the air? Acting sometimes is kind of that guy spinning all those plates in the air but in your head and in your body.
I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play. It’s not like acting.