I'm a character actress, plain and simple... Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.
In my whole life, when I've watched TV and movies, I've almost always felt, 'I could do that better,' and I thought everyone felt that way.
What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they're sort of larger than life and I think I'm still suffering from that reaction.
I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.
I don't want at the end of my life to look back at just a bunch of fictional movies I was involved in that kept taking me away from the real world.
I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.
'Taxi Driver' is a movie that changed my life and made me a serious actor. Scorsese and De Niro. I give credit for anything that I've ever done as an actor.
That is why it's so fun to make movies... you get to do lots of things you would never do in your normal life.
Movies are not about the weekend that they're released, and in the grand scheme of things, that's probably the most unimportant time of a film's life.
If you're going to spend two or three years of your life working on something, you've got to be making the kind of movie that discusses and influences the culture and is engaged in the world you're living in.
I mean, any movie or story that makes you accept and be grateful for something about your life is doing something right.
When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life.
To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time.
With stand-up, it doesn't matter who you are. If the audience claps because they love your movies, that clapping stops after five seconds, and then it's your job to make them laugh.
If I could rub a genie and anything could happen? Truthfully, my other love, and this is a complete 180, but I'd love to do a spy or an espionage pic, like a James Bond movie.
My daughter, Asia, has been in many of my movies. I love working with her. In the beginning, I was not supportive of her being an actress, but now I think she is fantastic.
My very favorite costumed character I've played would be Abe Sapien from the 'Hell Boy' movies. I love this guy.
If you lived in a provincial town like Torre Annunziata, where there was nothing to do in the evening but go to the movies with your friends, the cinema was a world of fantasy. I had always been in love with it.
I love doing kind of more kiddish-oriented movies, but I also love doing adult things. And I think it's fun to do a mix.
Horror movies have never been my thing. I love psychological thrillers like 'The Exorcist', 'The Shining', even though they scare the living daylights out of me.
You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.
