The clock is ticking, ticking, ticking towards the 30^th Film Independent Spirit Awards. The people (Film Independent Members) have spoken—voting closed this morning!—and now it’s just a matter of days until the whole world will know which films, directors, actors, and the rest have been chosen as the best of the best in the indie world this year.

As the countdown to Saturday’s big show lunges forward, now’s the time to get up to speed on the nominees, and here’s a perfect place to start: Check out these Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominee Interviews sponsored by Bank of America. Here are six of the coolest things we learned from them:

1. The best piece of advice Best Supporting Female nominee, Boyhood’s Patricia Arquette ever got on acting: “When they say action, you don’t have to do anything immediately. When they say action, take a deep breath and say to yourself, ‘Relax.‘ ”

2. If Best Female Lead nominee Julianne Moore (Still Alice) weren’t a filmmaker, she might have been a librarian: “I would have liked that, because I like to be in libraries, around books. I also had a short stint of wanting to be a doctor, but I don’t think my math skills were ever strong enough to do that… What I realize is that I just like people. I like working with people, and stories.”

3. Justin Simien, whose feature debut Dear White People, nominated for Best First Screenplay and Best First Feature, believes that Stanley Kubrick is the greatest American filmmaker of all time. “It doesn’t get any more independent. It doesn’t get any more ‘auteur’ than Stanley Kubrick.

4. Michael Keaton, nominated for Best Male Lead for Birdman, on the most challenging part of making the film: “It was challenging from the time he explained how we were going to shoot this movie, and make this movie, and then it just got more and more and more intense—but more and more and more fun. Challenging, to me, is what’s kind of exciting, you know, that kind of fear of, ‘are we going to be able to pull this off?’”

5. When asked what independent filmmaking means to him, Richard Linklater, whose film Boyhood is up for five Spirit Awards said, “It always comes down to whose telling a personal story, and that’s a loose definition, too. What’s personal?”

6. Ethan Hawke, nominated for Best Supporting Male for Boyhood, on what independent film means to him: “Independent cinema, to me, is when movies have a freedom of expression. Usually what happens is: the more money there is, the less creative freedom there is, because there’s a responsibility to make that money back. But whenever there’s real expression—that’s independent.”

Pamela Miller / Website & Grants Manager, and Mary Sollosi / Film Independent Blogger