Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside.

I moved from a mountain with one traffic light to New York City when I was 17, and it was an amazing, eye opening, creative adventure. I would walk through the streets of Manhattan looking up at these huge buildings, amazed that I didn't know a single person in any of them.

I grew up in a house my parents built together on a mountain in Tennessee. When we moved in, the walls were still going up, we didn't have hot water, and we turned it into an amazing adventure.

As I kid, I read the 'Little House on the Prairie' series and was sad when I got to the last book.

I had people put my feet on the ground for me and say, 'No, you don't know everything, and you need to learn this and this and this,' and it took me time to realize that.

If you try to multitask in the classic sense of doing two things at once, what you end up doing is quasi-tasking. It's like being with children. You have to give it your full attention for however much time you have, and then you have to give something else your full attention.

I was very outgoing, and a good-looking kid. I started doing all the catalogs. I made 60 commercials by the time I was 6. I must have been a natural, because I never took an acting lesson.

When I realised, on 'The Straits,' that physical work in the theatre takes much longer than directing scenes, it was like a eureka moment. If you want to work physically, you have to accommodate it, and it takes a disproportionate amount of time.