The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.

I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.

Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.

I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.

Sometimes, I don't like making emotions your career; something about it is kind of gross. But, at the same time, I want to move people the same way the songs make me feel.

As an actor, you're always told that your career needs box-office numbers.

I had the greatest year of my career in 2007. It's a year that I'm very proud of.

A fundamental principle that I learned in my career, and a principle that my consulting company McChrystal Group helps American civilian companies to adopt, is that winning units and organizations ensure that the time they actually spend - daily, weekly, and yearly - must hew closely to their priorities.