Arnold and Jamie Lee must have worked over the years with directors that did 50 takes, because I'd get like three takes or so and say, Ok, that's it, we're done.
I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen.
On 'Darjeeling,' I was on set every day and I acted as the second unit director and a producer on that film. I was there throughout the whole process. On 'Moonrise Kingdom,' I showed up for one day.
I've directed things that other people have written before, and I've written things and given them to other directors. So I'm very versatile in terms of that, and I enjoy all of it.
I got space from Travis Air Force Base, went back to the Philippine Islands and made it a point to meet the only American casting director in the Philippines. I was off and running.
Every character I've ever played, I always try to take him right to the edge and not allow him to fall over, but directors have a tendency to pull me back a little bit.
I decide intuitively what I want to do. When directors like Imtiaz Ali, Ayan Mukerji, Anurag Basu and Anurag Kashyap, who have stories to tell, come to me, why would I not be a part of it?
I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago.
There are a lot of actors who will watch the monitors. They'll do a scene, and then the director will look back to see if he got whatever he wanted. I just find it odd to sit there and watch yourself.
On 'Glee,' the director can be like, 'Hey, your face is looking a little too intense here.' And they can show me the screen, and I can be like, 'I know exactly what to do here.'
Every actress has a line she'll draw, where she'll say, 'This I will do and this I won't.' For me, everything has to be important to the story and the director has to be able to tell me why.
I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morris College in Atlanta, Georgia.
My philosophy is, 'Show up, shut up, and do your job,' and if you do it to the satisfaction of your director and the public, you're likely to be able to do it again.
But the privileges that one has enjoyed and exploited can sometimes turn against you: nobody thinks of you as a director, you are always an actress.
Sometimes the director will want you to write about the character, sometimes he'll want you to live in the location that the character is from or something like that, but I don't usually make a lot of notes or anything like that.
You have to remind casting directors out here that you don't just do one thing. There's a lot of people who do just one thing.
We had a very energetic floor manager and he was always jumping around all over the place. The director would send down messages like, Can you tell that actor to calm down?
And when I have lived elsewhere, every two weeks I have to fly back to LA. Even New York directors go there to audition. So I have to be there to a degree.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
The similarity between the big directors I've worked with is that they allow the writer to find a way of doing what they want done without saying 'do it this way.' They describe what they want, then letting the writer figure out a way to do it.
I view the whole thing as a collaboration. As an actor, I always found that to be the most freeing thing, when the director would collaborate with you, so that together you'd come up with something exponentially better.
