I aspire to be able to appreciate and review a director based on their accomplishments and based on who they are and what they bring to the material, regardless of their gender.
I've worked with Neil Jordan, who I really adore. We did The Brave One [2007] together.
I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.
There is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God.
It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.
I love the way L A. leaves you alone. I can go home, read all day, and nobody bugs me.
Privacy above all else. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.
I was a literature major in college and that was my thing, books.
Any actor working a long time should know how a shot is set up, where to place themselves, how to handle the lines. I'm a member of the crew, like the best boy, the electrician. What I'm good at is making eyes at the camera.
Look, it's terrible, I know, but weakness really, really bugs me, to the point that if there is a wounded bird on the sidewalk, I look at it and I go: I think I'll just kick it.
What I didn't realize is how completely consumed I would be by my sons. I didn't know that the rest of my life would become so little a priority.
I'm not interested in being perfect when im older. Im interested in having a narrative. It's the narrative that's really the most beautiful thing about women.
The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.
How could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see? I do believe in the beauty and the awe-inspiring mystery of the science that's out there that we haven't discovered yet, that there are scientific explanations for phenomena that we call mystical because we don't know any better.
I think "destiny" is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.
I don't find acting and directing schizophrenic, in any way. I find it completely easy to move between the two.
I also feel like I've learned over the years what is not important, and that is also great: to know what is pointless to spend your energy on, to be more specific.
There is nothing in this world that I am prouder of than my ability to feel, to survive and, yes, to be a fool for what I love and believe in.
I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.
I've got that Irish thing going on. Lots of Irish in my background.
There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. And wouldn't you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more every day.
a woman who struggles to recover from a brutal attack and sets out on a dark, psychological and physical journey for revenge and justice.
It's a tough trick to be able to create an intelligent movie that has socio-political commentary, and also has the emotional and moving stuff, at the same time.
My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
As time goes on, I will play characters who get older: I don't want to be some Botoxed weirdo.
I don't know why people think child actresses in particular are screwed up. I see kids everywhere who are totally bored. I've never been bored a day in my life.
Let how you live your life stand for something, no matter how small and incidental it may seem.
I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.
If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.
Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo.
I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.
Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.
I don't really think I have the personality. I am not very external. I don't want to dance on the table and do impressions. So I think that the way I approach it is really loving story. That's my first love - the words. The words and the story and how to create images. I guess I come at that as a director. I think that's much more in my personality to be a director, so that's kind of informed my acting.
I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.
You hold all of our futures in your hands. So you better make it good.
Definitely, there's a lot of trouble you come up against when you're acting and directing, about your performance. Sometimes it's hard to be objective about it. I will tend to get two takes and walk away. I don't belabor it, and it's important to me to have someone who says, "You know what? You should get another one, and maybe you should try it like that".
Everybody reads for me. I was never weird about that. I never minded coming in and reading. They should know if I'm the right person, and I should know if I want to do a movie.
Just to set the record straight, a salary for a given on-screen performance does not include the right to invade anyone’s privacy, to destroy someone’s sense of self.
~I used to think, What if there's an interesting movie and it conflicts with the boys going to a new school for the first time?... Well, I didn't anticipate that was going to be about a two-second dilemma. I didn't know the choices would be so easy to make.~
I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.
I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity.
I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.
When I went home, my family became a little lonely family because it was just me and my mom. Part of my longing to go back to work was wanting to be surrounded by these people who were teaching me things and drinking bad coffee at three in the morning while we were lying around in a bikini in the winter. Somehow it just felt like real life. It felt more like real life than my life.
I think I missed all of the wonderful things ... I missed the control that you have in film, and I missed getting it right, really getting it right, the way you hope people will see it. All of the things that people love about theater - the fact that it changes every night and that it's so spontaneous - all of those things just frighten me.
I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.
I'd prefer not to act in the film I'm directing. I think, though, as an actor, you do learn how to turn things on and off quickly and kind of compartmentalize. You learn to accommodate the camera and the other actors, to notice where the boom is and where you mark is, and be able to repeat something a few times.
Eventually this all passes. The public horrors of today eventually blow away. And, yes, you are changed by the awful wake of reckoning they leave behind. Hopefully in the process you don't lose your ability to throw your arms in the air again and spin in wild abandon. That is the ultimate F.U. and - finally - the most beautiful survival tool of all. Don't let them take that away from you.
When I go into the stores, I pet the saddles. Until security comes and takes me away.
I cannot believe in God when there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a supreme being and creator.
I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.
I want to change the system from within the system. And that means focusing and specializing.
Actors become actors because they loved entertaining their family by putting on the lampshade and dancing around as a kid, ... That's not my personality. For me, the fun part of making movies is seeing it as a director sees it. I like the architecture of movies. I like knowing what's coming and working to set that up.
I don't have a burning desire to act strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.
Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.
It's a skill that people are born with. Either you're a focuser or you're a multitasky person. I am a full-focus person.
Sometimes, you really don't understand why something is important to you until you get halfway through the movie - or maybe even all the way through.
I don't think there is anything good about fame. 'Tables in restaurants.' People say that but, then again, why don't you just call the day before? Or go eat somewhere else?
If you had been a public figure from the time you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, than maybe to you might value privacy above all else. I have given everything up there from the time that I was three-years old. That's reality show enough, don't you think?
I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.
I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.
There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.
I suppose that's my one little secret, the secret of my success.
Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.
Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.
When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.
I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.
Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.
I'm an atheist. But I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God. We celebrate pretty much every religion in our family with the kids. They love it, and when they say, 'Are we Jewish?' or 'Are we Catholic?' I say, 'Well, I'm not, but you can choose when you're 18. But isn't this fun that we do seders and the Advent calendar?'
My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.
I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.
But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.
Where I have problems is when I am in the midst of doing something that I am completely focused on, and then I am asked to buy shoes or something.
I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.
I don't need to be Tom Cruise. I just need to work forever.
Now apparently I'm told that every celebrity is expected to honour the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.
I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.
I think it's important that when people are struggling, that you not run away from them if you love them. Kristen, I mean, I look at the room tonight, you know, Kristen Stewart and Claire Danes, Jennifer Lawrence, all these young women that I worked with who basically were child actors like I was a child actor. And then I feel very protective of them, because even though I think I have managed to get through the process relatively sanely, I have my scars, and I hope to be in some ways a member of their family that's out there protecting them.
If I fail, at least I will have failed my way.
I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.
What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? The answer is always creativity; the answer is always art.
It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.
Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you. You have to be obsessed, you have to get up at 3 in the morning and go "Wait, I have an idea!" You have to continually be drawn over and over again to deepening inside that story, and ruminating over questions: "Why would he say this to her? Why if he was standing there, would she go?" Every one of those answers has to come from some personal place, and in order to do that, you can't sit on the surface. It's such a big change that you can't really explain it to anyone else.
I didn't work very much when they were young, and I had the luxury to be able to do that. Most people can't.
Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.
I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.
I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.
I think there is something to being curious about your choices, but not wanting to kind of pierce the bubble of them, because it takes away from the act of discovering.
I had to take my makeup off at work every night. I wasn't allowed to do it at home because my mom said that when your work day is done, you're done with work.
All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn't matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn't. There is something kind of refreshing about that.
Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.
I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.
Being twenty-something is all about taking it in: eating it, drinking it, and spitting out the seeds later. It's about being fearless, and stupid, and dangerous, and unfocused, and abandoned. It's about being in it, not on top of it
With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.
I do think it's true that anytime somebody comes to you and says, "I'd like to be in your film," it's never good to dismiss them or make fun of them, because if they're passionate and driven enough, they very well might find a way to be in your film.
My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time - or early.
So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.
Love and respect are the most important aspects of parenting, and of all relationships.
In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.
Cruelty might be very human and very cultural, but it is not acceptable and it is not an option.
When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.
There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.
I conducted a bunch of interviews for Interview magazine. They actually paid me. I think I was probably 18 or 19. I was in college and I remember feeling, like, "Wow." I had a real job, and they paid me money, and it was exciting.
We think, "If I have more money, I am more valuable. If I make more money, I am more valuable." It's all sort of wound up with this problem that humans have with their failure.
As I've said before, and I still hold to, I truly am the most boring person alive. And if there was a great investigation to be found at the end of the resume, it would be, the most boring person alive.
In the end, winning is sleeping better.
I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.
People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.
I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.
Interestingly, when you do films, sometimes you have conscious reasons, things that you were looking for, or stuff that you were trying to do. And then, you see the film and you think, "Wow, it ended up being something totally different!"
I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age.
Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store.
You guys might be surprised, but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child.
People say as a woman actor your career is over at 40. But then they told me I would never work again after I was 16.
The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.
I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.
There is no doubt that each of us is born an individual. Why is it then that so many of us die carbon copies?
I was never the ingenue or the pretty girlfriend of Tom Cruise in a movie. I didn't have that career, so I don't have to compete on that level.
I wish people could get over the hang-up of subtitles, although at the same time, you know, that's kind of why I'm kind of pro dubbing.
I was raised with a single mom and we had a very specific, very particular relationship. She worked with me and my job. I was almost three and we traveled everywhere together and she was really in my life in a really profound way. The most significant relationship of my life. It was beautiful and also an incredible, difficult struggle. I know how creative that life is, and how difficult it is to figure it out.
I absolutely love religions and the rituals. Even though I don't believe in God, we celebrate pretty much every religion in our family with the kids.
Cruelty might be very human, and it might be very cultural, but it's not acceptable.
I'd like to work more as a director. It's distracting being an actor, because - there's a lot of reasons. You find out you're going to work about six months before you start shooting, and then there's prep and there's post afterward, and there's stuff to do, and then suddenly you've gone a year without directing. There's a part of me that has to not be tempted by that in order to commit more to the directing. Honestly, the big reason for me to act is to observe other directors and learn from them. That seems to be the biggest draw.
It was a weird moment in my life and a weird experience [doing a theater]. It made me think, "Gee, I don't know if I ever want to do this again." And I love theater. I love going. I love the experience of theater. But I am not sure it's for me.
Being an artist is a way of saying, I am here, and this is what I stand for.
