I’ve always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year. It’s always been an erratic rhythm.
Man, I would have loved to have been fully cognisant of the power of Janis Joplin. I would have loved to have been part of the revolution.
Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don’t even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.
What is God, and how do you believe in him – how do you not believe? It’s a question the world continues to tussle with. People’s beliefs get them in a lot of conflicts.
I got the Mr. Incredible mold – the 3D, you know – it’s cool.
I think that ‘Saving Grace’ is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.
It’s always been my way to move about a little more horizontally. My career has never been like a shooting star.
In the life of a director – these days in particular – when it really does take so long to do a movie, with a few exceptions, actors may never work with a director again, even if they’re great friends.
I’ve never had a career of that kind of box office power. I’ve always learned the hard way.
I’m not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.
My nucleus of friends or something protects me from the machinery that is Hollywood. I don’t think I’m on the same quest that a lot of people are. I guess that could be a limitation.
In my career, I’ve never been a box office name. Granted, a couple of my movies have made a lot of money, but I’d do other movies which make very little money, or they’re not seen that much.
Drama is all about the moment of ultimate conflict for a person.
Sometimes I take a movie that I know is not great; it’s not great on the page, but I need to work. Sometimes I need to make the money. I need dough. I want to work, and so I’ll take something that is compromised in some arena. But it’s like, actors gotta act.
What does it mean to believe rather than to know? To surrender to something that’s not fact but faith?
I would love to work more – I really would – but there is not a lot of stuff around and the stuff that is around is not very complicated; it tends to lie a little flat.
My sister took me as her own. My mum had a lot of help raising me. That’s what happens in large families: your siblings raise you.
I guess I’m more of a direct person than an indirect one.
People think I disappear sporadically, but I just do projects that don’t get international acclaim.
I was playing ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn’t remember it.
With ‘Broadcast News,’ it became a non-issue, and with ‘The Piano,’ it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people’s minds about that, because that’s neither here nor there.
I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.
The cool thing about those small-budget movies is that there’s a tremendous amount of freedom the filmmakers have since there’s less money at stake.
Do I believe in God? I don’t know what that really means. I don’t know what my personal connections with G-o-d are. But spirituality is soulfulness.
I’m a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s huge in my life.
Sometimes I go, ‘Wow, this is a director I really, really want to work with,’ like David Cronenberg. I haunted David Cronenberg for years before, and then he offered me a role.
I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation – as an actor and as a person – perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it’s cute.
I really admire people who are extraordinarily tolerant and patient.
The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.
I love fiction, you know? I find it fascinating. So when film really does go into fictional places, that’s the most exciting for me. And when the fiction is about the person rather than about the place, that’s even more exciting.
Even very ordinary people, upon closer examination, can often look extraordinary.
It’s not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.
More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you’re working, and I find that a real violation.
There are, in terms of numbers, more leading roles for women in television than there are features. That’s absolutely certain.
The forcefulness of life is where vitality kind of intersects.
I wouldn’t even go spend the night at a friend’s unless they had a piano. But I didn’t have the chops, the extraordinary talent, to be able to play the piano professionally.
When you have an actor on set who is playing themselves in a movie that is about the most cathartic, most traumatizing event of their lives, you don’t even have to mention that.
I grew up on a farm. The worst-looking chickens are the best layers. The ones that are the scraggliest… those are usually the ones that are really cooking.
So much European cinema has open arms to stories carried by women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. And America is a little behind in that.
I have never been an easy fit. I’m a leading lady character actor; I don’t fit in one slot simply.
Good female parts are hard to come by, so I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage.
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