"Optimism. There’s been a lot of real cynical people, and they’ve been in my family, or they’ve been my teachers, and I’ve always felt...well, maybe I didn’t even think about it that much, but Cusack brought it up, for example, when he first read for Lloyd, he said, ‘This guy is a warrior for optimism.’ And we decided the way to do that character was that Lloyd Dobler was a guy who believed that optimism is a revolutionary act. And that is a lot me. There’s a lot of cynicism in the world, but you can be an optimist without being a puss about it."