The through line to his film work, though, is an attraction to strong directors (Martin Scorsese, Von Trier, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, Kathryn Bigelow, and Abel Ferrara among them), visionaries for whom he can, as he puts it, “be their creature. That frees me. I’m good at inhabiting things and I’m a good pretender, and in a structured environment I can let go of what stuff means. I can be the doer, they can be the watcher, and together we can make something.”