I want to have some effect on the way the world works in whatever way I can, and I also want to have the power to help get the movies that I think are important made.
I feel so gratified about having finished college. I learned how to articulate myself. It gave me confidence more than anything. And also the ability to analyze the text.
I liked that idea. Someone who’s trying to perform herself and not succeeding.
I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.
I studied English literature; I took 2 independent religion classes, but I wasn’t a religion major really.
I am looking for movies that are actually about something and that are questioning something. Movies that are provocative in some way and I am also looking for roles that I think will force me to grow or learn something about myself or the world in order to play them well.
The real test will be having a family; when I have a family you have to come home, you have to eat dinner with your kids.
Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don’t work.
I’m pretty good at indulging myself. I’m about to go travel for a week. I like to get massaged, go into steam rooms. I take care of myself.
I’m playing somebody who is a recovering drug addict who got out of prison. It takes place in 2 weeks-the 1st 2 weeks I’m out of prison.
I would like to do a big movie that many, many people see but I just know I would be miserable if it didn’t have something to it.
I think most human beings, even if you’re in a situation that’s constricting or complicated or hard, they try to survive.
Acting is really important to me, so I think it would be really hard for me to do something I didn’t believe in.
Now, there are roles which are capturing a vibrant moment in an older woman’s life. There was a time when those interesting roles stopped at 28. A few years ago we would have been finished by our age.
I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh.
Every actor has to find space where they are free, in order to do good work.
You have a right to your opinion about the work that you’re doing. An artist is as equally important as the director. If you believe that, you can work in any circumstances.
If you’re going to play a hooker in a movie, the movie has to have the perspective, of course, that it isn’t such a great thing. Probably the only way to really play a hooker well is to believe you’re doing something that’s good. But at the same time, the movie can’t have that point of view.
People write things in newspapers about me that aren’t true – or that are true. They take pictures of my kids on the way to school. I get a little bit inured to it in a way that I think most people probably aren’t.
We have our phones right by our beds, right next to us in our most exposed, vulnerable moments. And yet the government could have been collecting information from our phones at any moment. I think that basically as humans, we feel that’s a violation.
I don’t even notice the advertisement that comes up on my screen. I’m a smart person and it’s just something I’ve just blacked out because it doesn’t seem right to me.