The set of '12 Years a Slave' was an extremely joyous one! We all recognized that we were making a powerful, necessary and beautiful film, and we weren't about doing it without that sense of responsibility, and we recognized that we needed each other...
When I was trying to come up with a stage name, I thought 'Lord' was super rad, but really masculine - ever since I was a little kid, I have been really into royals and aristocracy. So to make Lord more feminine, I just put an 'e' on the end! Some pe...
I have to tell you, I live paycheck to paycheck like most Americans. It's very difficult for me to say, 'Hey, I can give up my paycheck,' because the reality is, I have financial obligations that I have to meet on a month-to-month basis that doesn't ...
We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people ...
All I wanted was attention from girls when I was a kid. Then I got my braces off, and then there was too much attention, and I was also mad that they didn't pay attention to me in the first place. Then I was just like, I couldn't put on blinders and ...
I started doing martial arts when I was about 7, and I got my second degree black belt when I was 19. So I have my second degree black belt, but I've never used it, and I had to stop when I got 'Instant Star' because I couldn't train.
Even before I went to the UN, I often would want to say something in a meeting - only woman at the table - and I'd think, 'OK well, I don't think I'll say that. It may sound stupid.' And then some man says it, and everybody thinks it's completely bri...
I didn't act in college, per se, because I didn't want an acting degree. I don't know what you do with that degree. When I was 16, I saw 'Usual Suspects,' and I wanted to be a director as well. So I thought I should go to school for directing and pro...
If you can contribute 45 minutes - one hour a day a week exercising, you're going to be a healthy person. You can cut down on diabetes and all of these manmade problems we have. I do embrace the fact that I can maybe be a voice for people to realize ...
I think what separates me from the candidates is the fact that I have a proven track record of being a fighter. A fighting for what people believe in, whether it is popular or not. Despite the opposition, I stand true. Because people know that I will...
I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in...
When I wrote the screenplay for 'Sleepwalk with Me,' I was imagining that another person would direct it. So I was using all my undergraduate film writing amateur expertise of 'don't direct on the page' because someone else was going to direct this. ...
Once you've made your first feature, you know what you can do wrong and how hard it is to shoot a feature. Before you do it, you just don't know how hard it is. Once you've done it, when you're writing a second one, it's almost like you're preparing,...
You look at the Pew Hispanic Center study on the number of illegal aliens in America and the number of jobs they have, that's 7.4 million, illegal aliens in America. A quick way to create jobs in America is to remove those illegal aliens from our com...
There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply ‘pencil work’ as John O�...
What's an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows, he doesn't know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn't admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn't really kno...
If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with...
Hiding my migraines on the set may have been my toughest challenge as an actor. There were times when the pain from migraine headaches was so severe that I literally had to crawl across my dressing room floor. But I couldn't let anyone know. If they ...
There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign lang...
There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on th...
In high school, I had to hide my comic book side, my nerd side from the civilian world so they wouldn't categorize me. They would try to marginalize me for what I like. I tried to give it up, believe me. I tried to kick the habit. But there's too muc...
