The laughs are as big as any film he's ever made. And yet, it kind of creeps you out -- the tension is real high.

My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it's a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.