I always find filming stressful. I get very caught up thinking about my character - 'Am I doing it right? Should it be done this way?'
If you're a female and you get asked by someone who shoots the most beautiful female scenes to be in their film, it's kind of exciting.
It's an entire industry focusing on young male viewers that want action and violence. They sell us something that isn't valid. They're selling films like a product.
My first film was with Cuba Gooding Jr, 'The Fighting Temptations,' and I had a little part here and there on little shows as guest stars. And I've taken acting classes.
Polanski's 'Chinatown' is a film that I have purposefully and consciously imitated, but 'Vertigo' is one that has got into my bloodstream. Every time I reappraise things that I've done, the influence is there, time and time again.
You make a film to distract people, to interest them, perhaps to make them think, perhaps to help them be a little less naive, a little better than they were.
They say 6 million people see you when you act in a film; it may only be 600 in a play. But the effect on the 600 may be truer and more lasting.
To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.
The truth for me is that I've been doing independent film since the get-go, so that's a big passion of mine, but the big ones are really fun, too. I like my world to be eclectic.
I don't want to be disrespectful to people who are incredible at their craft, but the truth is, if I didn't get paid for it, I wouldn't act. The best-paying jobs are usually the worst films. You're a very small cog in a big machine.
I think one of my biggest influences is Bette Davis. I've seen almost every one of her films, and she's been very inspiring to me.
People in the fashion industry have used the press a lot more than people in the film industry, because you have nothing to sell except for the image: The image is everything.
I preferred delivering my performance in person. I liked to be in control. You couldn't be in films.
I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.
Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.
Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.
One of the best teaching experiences Ed Schein and I had when we were teaching at MIT in the 1960s was inventing a course on leadership through film.
I knew nothing about martial arts. And I don't really like it! But in the film, I not only had to pretend that I knew all about it, I had to be the best at it. That was very difficult.
I like being able to see an innocence in people. I see a lot of beauty in youth. Young people are in progress. Their faces and bodies and minds are constantly changing. It's exciting to capture that on film.
With a lot of films, people are sitting on the outside looking in, but I want the audience to get a bit more intimately involved with what's going on, so that they maybe can experience it a little bit more intensely.
