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In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen.

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.

When you work on a film, it's important to feel that you are starting afresh and doing it for the first time. Also, it's important to have those butterflies in your stomach; you need to wonder how you are going to approach the character and whether you will be able to do justice to the part.

What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit.

In movies, you get to explore parts of yourself that in real life, people shy away from, like looking stupid or embarrassing yourself or getting too angry, anything inappropriate. As an actor, you walk into those moments.

I think good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess. You don't actually consummate it, but you get to pretend, imagine what it would be like.

Every movie you do, you find something in yourself that you probably didn't know that you had, and a director will find something in you that you can nurture and find and bring for the next one.

When you come to do the film, it is not the time to wonder why you do it. It's just how to do it.

You act in a movie, and at the end of the day, the director and editor decide what your performance is.