There wasn’t space to mood-up. I think Rose Byrne was just extraordinary. Talk about a character that could be really unsympathetic at times. She just jumped in these scenes that go from anger to hysteria to crying to laughing and back to anger. I just marveled.
If you can just see all the children of the world as your own, all the mothers of the world as you are, we can make a huge difference.
It helps me chill out and focus.
He has a very strong vision of what he wants.
That’s one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about “building your circle” and “mooding up,” because I really didn’t learn any technique.
On parochial school I was told I had an overabundance of original sin.
That’s the thing about independently minded children. You bring them up teaching them to question authority, and you forget that the very first authority they question is you.
The trouble with being an activist is you end up like Eve and you get kicked out of the Garden of Eden. You know, Eve was the first person who thought for herself. And she still gets a bad rap. I named my daughter after her.
I can’t speak for other people, but for me, it never really worked to think something like, “What Beatle did she like in high school?” or those kinds of elaborate backstories.
I think it’s very hard to be naked in a scene and not be upstaged by your nipples.
To become a lapsed Catholic, first go to a Catholic university.
I feel I’ve always been on the outside and always on the edge of an abyss. The women I portray, and the woman I am, are ordinary but maybe find themselves in extra-ordinary circumstances, and what they do is at great cost.
I don’t like to plan. Very often, for me, acting is like loving; it’s using the muscle that you use in loving, in that your heart feels open. Physically, you feel open. And so therefore your job is to enter, open, and listen. And see what happens.
I don’t think there’s a petty system of heaven and hell. The love of God is much more forgiving. I’m not a believer in a wrathful God at all.
How will the bombing of Baghdad, a city of five million, accomplish a regime change?
New York is very user-friendly if you don’t want to be in a car all the time. It can also provide you with surprises because it’s so compressed – if you walk around, you just find things.
You create this situation where you are so dependent on each other. That’s especially true for film. In theater, the actor has much more say, much more control, for better or worse.
I got married to Chris Sarandon, who was a graduate student, and he knew everything at that point, I thought, because he was older. He introduced me to poetry and black-and-white movies.
I had school debt I had to pay off. Sometimes I would do commercials to get me through. And so I kept bumping along like that and learning different things. I knew I wanted to get out on my own. I was just super-curious, and I was a good listener. And that got me through.
I’d have conversations with the camera crew about what was going on in the scene, so that they were prepared to shoot it. I love the fact that when you work, you create this tribe.