As an actor you have to have a strong vivid imagination as you're working and when the camera's rolling, but there's certainly a part of you that is aware of real life, that you're making a movie.
Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.
I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.
In the back of your mind, when you say you want to write music for the movies, you're saying that you want a big house, a big car and a boat. If you just wanted to write music, you could live in Kansas and do it.
It's sad that women characters have lost so much ground in popular movies. Didn't 'Thelma and Louise' prove that women want to see women doing things on film? Thelma and Louise were in a classic car; they were being chased by cops; they shot up a tru...
My favorite holiday memory was sitting at home all day in my pajamas during winter break for school watching a bunch of old Christmas movies like 'Jack Frost' and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' with my siblings and parents.
When I was in seventh grade, I asked my parents for a mobile recording system for Christmas, and I got it. I didn't come out of my room for years after that. I'd get invited to the movies and I'd say, 'I'm gonna finish a couple of demos.'
It's fun when you start a movie, because it's kind of like you get to go Christmas shopping... you get to make your wish list and you start thinking about what each character needs.
Have you read 'The Grapes of Wrath?' That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the mov...
A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.
None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.
I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera.
So many people seem to prefer my silver-screenings of movie stars to the rest of my work. It must be the subject matter that attracts them, because my death and violence paintings are just as good.
And that's why I chose on purpose not to have a death scene. We've seen them in a million movies and it's too much like cranking the tears out. I didn't want that scene.
I suppose some studio executive would say it's death for a comedy if people aren't all laughing in the same places, but I find with my movies that people laugh in very different places. I can't control it.
My first western was 'Death Hunt' with Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin; that was where I learned to ride. The movie was based on a true story about a guy that eluded the Mounties in Canada. We were in Canada for six weeks riding horses.
No movie influenced me more to go after my dreams than 'Flashdance.' After seeing it, I took 15 dance lessons a week. I cut all my sweatshirts. I did the 'Maniac' thing.
So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.
I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there's no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.
I think once you enter the dating world and you realise it's nothing like those Disney movies you watched when you were a little girl, you just become more guarded.
One of the things that's great about New York is that it is not a one-industry town. It has education, academia, the service industry, arts, publishing, theater, politics, fashion, finance, as well as movie-making.
