When I read 'Stand By Me,' it was like, 'This is a look back at the same time period when I was growing up, and it was about kids, but it really felt like what it was like to have those powerful feelings of friendship at age 12.' That's what got to me.

When I show up to act in a movie for somebody else, I just want to be nice and helpful and do what they want because I know how difficult it is to make a movie. I don't want to cause any problems. So you show up and do your job, and I think if a director understands that, you don't make a lot of demands.

A lot of times I'll make films that are mostly character-driven films - stories that involve people. Like, I make the joke: I like to make movies about human beings that live on Earth.

It's a very slow process - two steps forward, one step back - but I'm inching in the right direction.

My grammar school caught on to the fact that the reason I was falling asleep in class was that I was doing working men's clubs till 10 or 11 at nights. My mother was told I shouldn't do it anymore. Of course, I was bringing in money to the family, so nobody liked hearing that.

The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering galleries, they are clearly heard at the end, and by posterity.

My family grew up in Florence. There I became what I am now, and those are things that cannot be forgotten.

I come from a close-knit family, and I have four older brothers that have inspired me in so many ways.