There were times my mom and I butted heads – over my curfew, over something like that. Whenever we would hit these moments of emotional backfire, she would say, ‘You just don’t understand what it’s like to be a mother… I could never handle losing you.’ I was like, ‘OK, but just, like, chill out.’
Girls in this industry sabotage one another.
I’m not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.
What ‘Short Term 12’ did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more. The healing process that came for me for making that movie and then sharing it with people – I was able to see, first hand, that movies can have a healing power and they can teach us things.
‘Short Term 12’ was such a marathon. It’s like trying to convey the same emotional depth as ‘The Gambler’ but with less time and a fingernail’s worth of the budget.
I’m not sure what it means fully to be a parent.
I’d say there’s more of a difference between a play and movie to TV than there is between TV and movies. But there’s something involved in the repetition of things that require something different from me in order to sign onto a script.
Because we put ourselves in a movie or on TV, then it must mean we want to be completely open to the world. Sometimes, people will run up to you as if this is Disneyland and I’m a character. I understand their point of view, but it’s difficult to explain how terrified it makes me. I’m so nervous.
I feel very much aware of my mortality. I’m here, and then I’m not. It’s the same thing with everything else: the movie comes out, and then it’s gone. Everything is changing all the time, and I’m not going to stress out and spend my entire time chasing something that ultimately doesn’t exist.
I like working, I just don’t like to get involved in the competitiveness of it.
Any time I was at Trader Joes, and the person bagging my stuff would be like, ‘Did I go to college with you? How do I know you?’ Then it took awhile, and suddenly people were like, ‘Oh, you are the girl from ‘United States of Tara.’
We’ve all recognized the moment when the world has handed us a situation that is bigger than our youth can handle, and we have to grow up in a second. And when you do get to the other side, all it does is take us to this new level of existence that is more beautiful and more complex and, in some ways, more painful.
The thing I was always most protective of was my mystery. I worried that if I gave too much of myself, then I would limit the characters I could fall into.
When what you do is play characters every day, all day, I wasn’t really interested in playing a pop star on the weekends.
If I had my way, I would never do a leading role.
We all enjoy a magic show, but we don’t demand a Q&A afterward explaining how it was done.
I’ve always felt like I’ve had the ability to choose which roles I was going to play. I don’t think that the industry agreed with me, but I’ve always had a bit of a headstrong attitude of only doing the things that I really believe in and want to explore.
If you’re in somebody’s head for 12 hours a day for four weeks, it’s like your brain actually wires itself to start thinking that way.
The point to have a child is to introduce them to this planet that is in some ways dying and hopefully, this new generation, these new untainted brains, will be the people to fix some of these things that this generation can’t.
The constant is always mythologies and the very first stories that we have. All of the movies that last, that you return to, the movies that struck you as a kid and continue to open up to you 10 years later and 10 years after that – those are the movies I want to make. Those things are eternal.
The only way I can feel comfortable being an actor is if I can find stories that I believe are important to be shared.
Each step of the way I’m learning. When I leave an interview, I learn whether I feel, ‘Oh, that was nice,’ or that made me feel like a little piece of me was taken. It’s a line that is always on the edge of being crossed, and once you cross it, what’s next?
Any movie I’ve done, my character has had a secret. Whether it’s in the movie or not, it is usually never and it’s usually not something I tell anybody. It is for me.
In this industry, where things change so quickly, I’ve found that having no expectations is the happiest way to go.
I think I was always a little sponge as a kid, and I was always looking for more information constantly.
Now I find seriousness to be rather ridiculous.
I’ve become more comfortable as time has gone on with saying goodbye because… I’ve been having so many conversations about the cyclical nature of life. It just keeps going.
When I’m sitting in bed watching ‘Chopped’ – that Brie I know. But I don’t know the Brie in sky-high heels on a carpet with a bunch of people screaming at me. I wonder what she’s like.
The idea of singing and dancing throughout my life and finding that bliss is something I wanted to express and explore within myself and hopefully spread that idea to other people.
I think it’s always the moments that are the trials that end up making you become a hero in the end. You’re not a hero unless you’ve gone through the trials. And it makes these moments so much sweeter, so much better. I don’t believe in ‘deserved,’ but I might believe in ‘earned.’
I don’t deal well with being told what to wear and sit on a mark. It just feels like my soul is being ripped out.
Maybe you’re not perfect, but you’re willing to actually look at yourself and take some kind of accountability. That’s a change. It might not mean that you can turn everything around, but I think there’s something incredibly hopeful about that.
It’s really hard to see yourself and to recognize that you are a human being like everybody else. You just think everybody’s judging you.
‘Basmati Blues’ deals with a great social issue, GMOs, but it’s told through love and song and dance.
I think if a movie makes you cry, you probably needed to cry.
I know what my dharma is: I’m supposed to be an actor.
I’m just trying to enjoy the fact that I have gained some respect from some people whom I respect.
I didn’t go to prom – I was homeschooled.
I believe in what movies say, and I’m not an actor because I want things to be about me. I have no interest – if there was any way for my face to not be in a movie and still be an actor, I would do it.
It can get really messy inside my head, and it’s usually just because everybody can get really self-centered at some point. And so what usually keeps me from quitting is that my reasons for quitting are just lame. I wouldn’t want anybody else to talk to myself the way that I talk to myself.
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