The Coens both give you direction, and then it's up to you to kind of figure out the music of what they're saying.

I love Donnie Darko movie so much. Just before I got that script, I had been to see some European art film. I walked out of that movie and said to my husband, "That's what I want to do! I want to do an art film and take it to the edge." Within two weeks, we were getting ready to go on vacation, and my agent called.

I thought Sissy Hickey should be really skinny and leathery and have one of those really husky voices, but Del Shores kept saying, "I wrote this part for you." He took me to his house and showed me pictures of all his Texas relatives, and they looked exactly like my family.

I knew Steve Carell because of Little Miss Sunshine, so I felt very comfortable with him. Maybe he always does it to guest stars, but I felt as though he was being particularly funny with me, and particularly stretching the boundaries of improvisation. He's such a comic genius. I hate to use that word, because everyone throws it around, but Steve Carell is channeling something.

To me, All About Steve movie is sweet-natured and sweet-hearted, and I can't get enough sweet-hearted movies. I want to be inspired right now. I think things are pretty tough in the world. And people at the première were loving it - I mean, loving it! So I'm so sorry to hear people saying that it is the worst movie of 2009. I don't buy it at all.

Tone is a very difficult thing. You can't write tone, I don't think. You can try - you certainly try. I write too, so I know I'm trying desperately to communicate to whoever's going to direct my pieces, the way I see the humor. But it's very difficult.

I was up at Big Sur with Christopher Reeve and Christine Lahti, doing this woman in a big fat-suit - Mrs. Bassett in Tennessee Williams' Summer And Smoke - and my husband was in the show too, playing Lahti's fiancée. Every night he'd be proposing to beautiful Christine Lahti, and I'd barrel onstage in this fat-suit. I hated it! But I did it, because by then I knew that that was my casting.