Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.

The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I've done. That to me is what my job is.

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart; if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.

I'm lucky if I find one movie a year that's worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.

For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.

I'm supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I'm somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you've got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I'm somebody else?

Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.

But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don't win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.

It's a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it's a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you're told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.

Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?

I'm aware that, from the outside, this looks like I've got quite an ego.

I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higer the fences get.

Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.

As the years have gone on, I find one of the dangers of watching dailies... is you fall in love with moments.

I'm not someone who's led my life trying to get publicity; I'd rather do my work and go home.

I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

And I certainly won't lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.

My life will change, because I want it to change; and also because this is something I'm committed to doing and that I believe my life has been leading towards.

I've been on sets where things weren't relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.

I'm not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I'm living any kind of a life. I'm actually trying to convince people: I don't want you to know what I'm living, because it's none of your business.

I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.

I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.

Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.

'The 24 Hour Plays' is a quite brilliant, exhilarating event for everyone concerned.

A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

Am I arrogant? I've been arrogant, sure; everybody's been arrogant.

Anytime someone can beat the acting out of someone else, I think it's a wonderful thing.

As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.

As an actor, you're always nervous as to what a director will do with something.

As long as we, in the United States, continue to insist that our politicians have to spend all of their time raising millions of dollars for television ads, it will be corrupt. If we leave it up to the politicians to clean up lobbying and finance reform, nothing is going to change.

At the end of the day, people have to respect people's differences. I am different than some people would like me to be.

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

Both 'Consenting Adults' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross' revolve around the economic stresses of the '90s. They are about what people do when they're pushed against that wall, and how they're manipulated. They are both morality tales, though in very different genres.

Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of 'House of Cards' at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they've been doing on 'House of Cards' and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.

Essentially, your voice is an instrument; it's a muscle, and you have to treat it like a muscle, and so you have to work it.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

Film is very condensed.