You know, I became an actor because I love solving problems. I'm a big crossword puzzle person. I love doing research. One of the reasons I became Jewish is because I love text study. I love going into rehearsals day after day for three, four weeks, trying stuff, coming back the next day, building on that. So many times I'd drive home from the studio [after] shooting and I'd be thinking about a certain moment, and I'd think, "Oh, I know what to do!" And I never get a chance to visit that moment again. But in theater, I get to visit it every performance. You learn the vocabulary, you know what the parameters are, so then play with it. You can say, "I'm going to take this pause a little longer this time." It's thrilling! Live performance, there's nothing like it.

(On Red Dragon) They recreated the ginal] set [of Silence Of The Lambs]. They had to make a whole wig for me. I had a buzz cut, because I was still doing Boston Public. We had our first meeting in Dino De Laurentiis's office. When I walked in, Tony [Hopkins] saw me and he started dancing across the room, singing, "We get to do it again! We get to do it again!" He's so silly. It was wonderful having the opportunity to work with Tony again. He actually had me come into the set while he was filming something of his and had me feed him the lines. He was very reassuring... But the movie was really problematic, I thought. Because Manhunter is such a good film of that book, and what made it a good film is the guy who played the FBI guy, William Petersen, brought the weight of the world: a man who had seen the underbelly of society and had been deeply affected by it and changed by it. Whereas in Red Dragon, you had Ed Norton, who looks like he just graduated from high school. He's got this exuberant, youthful, optimistic kind of demeanor. So I didn't buy his character's dilemma.

(On Deep Rising) It's a film that takes place in 24 hours, and like with any movie, you're shooting out of sequence. You shoot what set you're in. My very first day in Vancouver, we shot the scene in which my character dies. The very last day, 17 weeks later, we shot the scene that leads up to that. My character went through a very minutely detailed deconstruction as the movie went on. His hair started to get mussed, he lost his tie, his shirt got ripped, his glasses got broken. And I sat down with the continuity person and we worked out a chart, so we knew exactly how that deconstruction was going to happen, and then tried to stay with that so that it made sense.I developed a very serious infection, a staph infection in my foot that I got from my infant daughter, and so I was laid up for a good portion of time. I would have to have a nurse come to my apartment every eight hours, or to the set, and give me antibiotics intravenously. And I was not allowed to go out and socialize, and this was right at the key time when everybody in the cast was bonding. So I felt extremely isolated. I was inactive, so I was ballooning in weight. So it ended up not being a terrific experience. I was excited about doing it because it was more money than I'd ever been paid, before or since, for a single project. And then it ended up being a movie that just did not get seen. It was about a cruise ship disaster, and it opened a month after Titanic. Nobody cared.

(On Outrageous Fortune) It was a great object lesson, because Shelley Long was the kind of actress-and there are a lot of performers like this-who make decisions about how to play things at night, alone, in front of their mirror. Then they come in and do those things. Then there are other actors who make no decisions about how to play something until they're in the moment, looking into their scene partner's eyes. So they're completely available for whatever happens. And those are actors who tend to avoid getting into patterns. Bette [Midler] totally personified that kind of acting. Arthur Hiller would do 15 takes of the same thing, and he would print all of them. So you'd watch the dailies the next day-he always encouraged the actors to come watch the dailies-and you'd see Shelley do take after take after take after take, exactly the same. Down to the millimeter. The hand movements, everything. Bette would do it angry, happy, sad, giggly. A million different adjustments. Every take was different... When you do that, you give the director and the editor huge resources with which to assemble a performance. Because our job as actors, especially in front of a camera, is almost like textile artists. We spend so much time getting the right texture of yarn, and working out the color scheme, and binding off the weave, and making it just right, and we do that and that's our work that we've done and then they take it and they cut it up and stretch it and dye it and put it into a tapestry. And nothing bears any resemblance to what you thought it was going to be. Your performance is no longer yours.

(On The Client) The real joy of that situation was getting to work with J.T. Walsh. I had worked with him early in my career [in The Beniker Gang, 1985], and he was drinking at the time, and he was a terrible person to be around. By the time we did The Client, he'd achieved sobriety, and he was the most wonderful, gracious-just a true prince.

(On Silence of the Lambs) I was working at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, doing Betrayal, and I got a call from my agent that Jonathan Demme wanted to see me for Silence Of The Lambs. The agent said, "Read the book." So I went to the drugstore and got a paperback of Silence Of The Lambs. Read it in one sitting. Sat up all night. Then I drove down to New York the next day, went into Jonathan's office, and he greeted me like and old friend and he said, "You know, I'm a New Yorker and I see theater all the time. I've seen everything you've done, and I really love your work. I'm very anxious to work with you. I want you to be in this movie." You never have an audition like that! He said, "What do you want to play? You know the book?" I said, "Yeah. I'd love to play Dr. Chilton." He said, "Well, Chilton needs to be in his late 50s, so we're going a good deal older than you. Is there anything else?" I said, "One of the Smithsonian bug guys, that'd be great fun." So, a couple weeks later, I get news. We're going to do a reading. Jodie Foster has been hired as Clarice, and Gene Hackman has been hired as Hannibal. The day before the reading, I get a call from Jonathan: "Gene Hackman has dropped out. His daughter doesn't think it's the right role for him. So we don't have a Hannibal. But we still want to do the reading. Jodie is flying in. This is not an audition, I would not cast you in this role, but to help us out, would you, tomorrow, at the reading, read the part of Hannibal Lecter?" Sure! So the first time we read the script, I was sitting across the table from Jodie Foster and I was playing Hannibal. I just had a great time. After the reading Jonathan took me aside and said, "You can play Chilton. You convinced me." A few weeks later, we're going to do another reading. We now have the person who's going to play Hannibal Lecter: Robert Duvall. Well, that fell through, and finally it's going to be Tony Hopkins. And I thought, "Tony Hopkins?" Because his film career was in the toilet. Then we did a reading and I sat watching him doing it and I thought, "He's terrible. He's terrible! That's not the way to do it!" Because he wasn't doing it anything like the way I did it. Then during the shooting of it, I kept-I loved him. I found him a beautiful person to be around. But I just thought he was so wrong for the role. And I had a great time doing the movie, but when I saw the screening, I thought, "This is a disaster. They're all so excited about this film, but it's not scary to me, it's not believable." I still don't like it as much as everybody else. It was the reactions of other people that made me realize that maybe it was better than I thought.