“I like charcoal drawing a lot. I’m not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I’m on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I’m in and turn it into an art studio.”

Sometimes I find myself at three o’clock in the morning painting something and throwing things around and seeing what works. I’d like to properly study fine art. I think it would be quite an interesting endeavor.

A lot of times, when you’re seeing something that you’ve done, you’re thinking about the experience you had making it, not about the experience of the product.

Whatever the genre of film you’re doing and whatever the source material is, you have to adapt to the different genre, but it’s the same work, as an actor. You’re just trying to ground it in reality and find your truth in it.

Drama schools are very small community, a very incestuous community, so you get to know one another very, very quickly and it just washes over after a while. Every now and then I’ll say “dude” or I’ll say “bro,” and people will laugh.

When you’re doing a play, you don’t always have a practical world that you’re working off of. You have to create it for yourself.

I’m a total luddite when it comes to technology. Pretending I know how to use a computer is a challenge.

I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.