Taylor had seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? and his manager became aware that I was available and interested in working last summer. And so they sent me the script with an offer on a Friday. I read it over the weekend and was in the movie on Tuesday. It was literally after talking with Finn that I knew I wanted to do the film, because I realized he had the sort of passion for his own material, the sort of nuance and understanding of his own material that only a writer/director can have. It was going to lead to a film unlike any other. I also really liked his first film, Dream with the Fishes.

I think the script is incredibly well written and I always felt that way. My favorite scenes are often the smaller, interstitial scenes which Finn and Robin and I created together. These scenes often have no dialogue but capture moments between Daly and Zoe as they begin to have feelings for one another. These scenes are incredibly delicate. One example is the one in which we simply sit on her sofa together without saying anything to one another at the end of a scripted scene.

[Laughter.] I do. I remember my first several crushes, each of them unrequited. Luckily as a man, as you get older, women's tastes diversify. And I think what's lovely about Finn's film and his choice of me to play the man who ends up, if only for a moment, getting the girl is that it's a reflection of reality, not film or movie reality. My character is a real person, he looks like a real person, maybe even a funny-looking real person, and he gets the girl, and that happens in life.

Well, there is that very important factor of her seeing no other man! Setting that aside, he is decent to her in a way in which probably no one else has been. And they recognize in one another a vulnerability and a need for real companionship. And that draws them together.

My guilty pleasures in music are all in the country music realm. I'm a real sucker for not only old-time country music, about which I needn't feel guilty at all because who can have disdain for Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Ralph Stanley, and Merle Haggard, but I also am very vulnerable to the latest that Nashville has to offer. My record collection also includes Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson... I like this new guy Brad Paisley and though others might shame me, I'm proud for the taste.

It varies. Usually the people with whom I'm working inspire me. Robin inspired me on Cherish. Her generosity inspired me. Here she was in this role that's truly beyond being central to the film. And her enthusiasm and her passion for the material and her generosity to her scene partners never flagged. Actors who have inspired me as I myself learned about acting have been everyone from Peter Sellers to Charles Laughton to Peter Lorre to Syndey Greenstreet to Walter Huston to actors whose careers are thriving today like Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, Jon Voight. I'm working with Jon Voight right now and he's inspiring me on a daily basis.

I've been incredibly lucky as an actor in that I've gotten to be in the presence of really extraordinary visionary directors working on their own material or material which they've developed very closely with writers so that their passion is as if they've written the material themselves. My favorite projects as an actor are those in which you feel that the director wouldn't be able to live without directing that particular film. This was true about Finn on Cherish. You like to feel like the director feels as though he's working on a work of art. And not that he's contributing to some Hollywood moneymaking machine, that he's this year's product. And so really without exception, the directors with whom I've worked starting with Nora Ephron, who directed the first film in which I got to appear, all the way through the Cohen Brothers and Miguel Arteta and now Finn have taught me about directing and have inspired me as a director.

As an actor I have Minority Report coming out and The Good Girl, which is Miguel Arteta's film starring Jennifer Aniston. And then as a writer/director I have a film coming out in October called The Grey Zone, which is about Jewish inmates in the Nazi death camps who were forced to aid in the extermination process. It stars David Arquette, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi, Allan Corduner, and my wife Lisa Benavides.

I shot that film in Bulgaria last year. It was the most difficult experience I've had in my life either personally or professionally by leaps and bounds. It was worth it, but it doesn't have me rushing to direct another movie right now. I was in Sophia, Bulgaria for over five months. The pre-production and production themselves were extremely demanding both emotionally and physically because of the subject matter, because of the physical demands of trying to re-create Auschwitz, where the film takes place, on a very limited budget. But I'm extremely proud of the film and of everyone's contribution to the film.