I never want to turn something down because I'm afraid to do it, because of some idea of image or whatever. That was never anything I set out to do. In fact, the opposite, I always want to confuse people in terms of any kind of image and be unpredictable in any kind of movie I make.
I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.
I have this theory that, depending on your attitude, your life doesn't have to become this ridiculous charade that it seems so many people end up living.
So yeah, a good director will be able to listen and hear everything, but have a confident vision of his own that he can say, 'oh yeah - that's a great point.' And you never know; often you can help far more than you think you can, because there's so much more that he's juggling than an actor.
You're creating a different world and the actor's job is to be able to convince the audience to enter into that world, whether it be actually something that you recognize from your own life or not.
When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.
We are starting off with our own different characters and our own laws and everything, looking at Bruce Wayne and how he came to be the person that he was and how he comes to be this man that jumps around in the Bat suit.
I've had some painful experiences in my life, but I feel like I'm trivializing them by using them for a scene in a movie. I don't want to do that. It just makes me feel kind of dirty for having done that.
In terms of the romantic kind of lead, I just never enjoy those movies very much. Maybe they'll come to interest me more as I get older. I doubt it, but maybe. Romantic comedies tend to be, for me, an oxymoron.
It's about pursuing it rather than waiting to see what comes along. That's partly because I found myself getting typecast, as everyone does unless they pursue roles that are very different from what they've done before.
