Things either become unclear in a story or they're just ambiguous with no real point. So defined gray area with clarity that also works in the narrative, that's tricky.

You read something and you know it's not there yet. There's a little section here that... this part's good but that is a little not, it doesn't quite work. That doesn't quite work. That's easy. To say, "OK, now, this is what I think will fix it." That's harder. And most people can tell you what's wrong with something. Very few people can say what they would do to fix it.

One of the things that I love when I go to a film or when I'm reading some book or whatever, is to be told a secret I thought only I knew and then someone says, "Oh my gosh, you know, too." And film can take us into private moments in a way that the theater, I think, kind of can't, and that's one of the reasons I like doing films. And the way a book can is that these little secrets and the private things that go on in our minds that maybe we haven't shared with anyone, and then someone writes it or shows it to you in a film, you think, "Oh, that's me. Oh my God, that's me, I have that secret."

A lot of acting is working with your own psyche in order to allow yourself to be open and reveal yourself. But then of course there's a healthy part of you that says, "Well, don't do that." You know, you're going to be in front of people. You could look foolish. You could get it wrong. You could be too big or too small or not realistic or whatever those things are. People might criticize you. There's all kinds of reasons not to be open. But you do want to be open.

As an actor, you want to be open to the unexpected. So in order to be open to that, you do have to get out of your discursive mind just like in any creative process, this isn't just about acting. So you have to learn a little bit how to work with your own mind.

Once I get on something, once I have something that I'm working on, then I become very obsessive. In a good way. I mean,... is there a positive way to say obsessive? It's a good thing and if you're out there and you're working on something right now and you're crazed and you're up in the middle of the night, or you can't stop thinking about it, or you have to keep reading other things about the subject that you're working on or whatever. That's good and I think that's necessary creatively.

It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or the 'good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.