Quotes

Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.

I spent four hours with a shrink trying to prove I was normal enough to play a hooker. Does that make sense?

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

It's not my personality to be extroverted emotionally, so acting has been helpful to me.

I could tell you the criticism backward and forward about Little Man Tate (1991). But it didn't bother me as long as they were talking about the work and not about 'she has fat thighs' or something. But I fared really well with 'Tate,' so I shouldn't be complaining.

Kids talk like sailors now. Adults don't want to know.

They've lived longer, they're more confident about their choices and they don't have to be hip and cool anymore, which I think is a godsend - you make really bad choices when you are trying to be hip.

If I fail, at least I will have failed my way.

A cheap cry for attention and money filled with hazy recollections, fantasies and borrowed press releases. Buddy has done nothing but break our mother's heart his whole life.

n devoting more time to parenting her sons than film work: "There's something so pure about the ways boys love you.

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.

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.

I love to see theater but not to work in it. Too messy, and I have a bit of an inferiority complex.

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 nervous every day on a film set. The anxiety of performance is not like anything else because you never know if you'll get there or not. There is an anxiety when it comes to finding the truth.

I'm lucky that people do leave me alone. I'm not Madonna. The red carpet is work for me. I work from 9-to-5 and when I get home, I don't want to go back to work by going to an industry event. For me, putting on makeup and a fancy dress is work.

I've learned something in the last few years that I really didn't know about myself as an actor. I basically learned how to stay happy. It's important for me to be happy working or I feel resentful. I don't like it. I hate myself. What I know now is that I really need to love the director. I need him to be a good parent. And then I will lie down on the train tracks for him and go to the ends of the earth for him.

Motherhood doesn't mean I don't have a creative side that I need to nourish. It doesn't mean I don't have independence from them. I'd be a crazy person if I didn't.

As time goes on, I will play characters who get older: I don't want to be some Botoxed weirdo.

At first I didn't want to do the part, but only because I was afraid my friends would tease me afterwards. I thought, wow, they've got to be kidding. It was a great part for a 21-year old, but I couldn't believe that they were offering it to me. I was the Disney kid.

I spent four hours with a shrink to prove that I was normal enough to play a hooker. It was the role that changed my life. For the first time I played something completely different. But I knew the character I had to play - I grew up three blocks away from Hollywood Boulevard and saw prostitutes like Iris every day.

There was a welfare worker on the set every day and she saw the daily rushes of all my scenes and made sure I wasn't on set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word.

You rarely have a director like Martin Scorsese or a co-star like Robert De Niro, who rehearses and rehearses until you get the feeling that for the time you're with him he is the character. It's so real it's frightening.

Also the theme of abandonment is a really big one for me.

But also, as time goes on, you realize that you are better cast for certain things more than others.

But DVDs are really should be about the director. As an actor, there's only so much I can contribute really.

But I try to do them all in French, because, you know, I - it's a big part of my personality, the French thing.

But it's also partly that I'm picky because I am now over 40 and there's less parts so I only want to do the ones that really move me.

But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project.

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

But when you dub in France you do it with the other actors, so you're in the room with them, which is quite wonderful. And sometimes it takes on a different life of its own.

By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.

I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.

I did films because I loved making movies, and I love movies. I love the language of films and I would be just happy being a technician or a theatre director. Just to be involved with films.

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

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.

I feel funny because I have a DVD player. It's just I'm such a technophobe that I don't really know which button to push, so I've actually never listened to any of them.

I get really embarrassed because I was such an unattractive teenager with pimples and a funny nose. It's like someone seeing your old home movies.

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

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.

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.

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

I love Fincher, have known him for a long time, have wanted to work with him for ages and I followed what he does.

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.

I mean, my mom took me to R rated movies when I was young and - because she knew me and knew the films well and knew that they were - they might have been provocative and they might have been serious and dramatic, but that they weren't damaging.

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.

I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.

I think it would be nice to dub some French movies occasionally or European movies just to see how an audience might react to them, to see if you could maybe get people in different parts of the country interested in foreign films.

I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.

I went to private school and wore a uniform. I wasn't sheltered because I saw everything and knew everything. But I was raised very conservatively and it definitely didn't trick over into my own life at all.

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 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'm a really good flyer. I like airplanes.

I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

It's true that I've played a lot of girls and women who were struggling or in trouble, from Taxi Driver to The Accused to Little Man Tate and Sommersby.

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.

Maybe in your 20s, because people bring baggage to it, there's a wider range of things you can do. When you're older, you know about the things that you're good at.

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.

Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.

So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.

Sometimes I make mistakes and do bad things but that's part of the process too.

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

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.

The thing about child actors is that you either have the weird personality that can do it and remain well adjusted and have a real strength of character, or you just don't have that make up.

There's definitely less roles for you when you get older. The same is true with men too. You write a book, you usually write about the ages between 20 and 35. In terms of box-office and demographics, those are the kinds of people that see the movies and want to see themselves reflected.

Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.

With any movies that don't have high profile actors in them, you only have a few windows of really garnering interest in the movie, especially now with all the multiplexes and with the mainstreamizing of the American public.

You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.

You hope your movie encourages people to be more involved, more open and better.

You want to leave your movie after 55 days of shooting and feel like you're a better person and not a worse person and that's your first impulse.

I think it's one of the finest films that's ever been made in America. It's a statement about America. About violence. About loneliness. Anonymity. Some of the best works are those that have tried to imitate that kind of film, that kind of style. It's just a classic. I felt when I came home every day that I had really accomplished something.

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