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.

Milton Katselas said, "Who are you to look down your nose at Anna Magnani and Maureen Stapleton? Who do you think you are?" I was doing this kooky meditation at the time called inner-guide meditation, where you go into a cave and you have a guide, and you fly around. So I said to my inner guide, "Take me to the energy that's blocking me from accepting my casting" - because I understood it intellectually, but I didn't want to do it in my heart.

The Coen brothers: Of all the directors I've worked with, they're the only ones who have given me the storyboards attached to the script. It was very cool for me, because I knew when I was in close-up or if it was far away, and it also made me know that anything that happened in the edit wasn't personal. Because they edit their own movies, so they were editing it as they went.

Sometimes I'll say, "When Sandy Bullock and I were doing Speed - the movie, not the drug." Just in case someone's listening.

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've workshopped Medea where I have goddesses, and I'm naked onstage and painted gold, and talking in tongues, and the goddesses come and dress me, and Hecate arrives and fills me with the power to go kill the children so I can send them to the afterlife and do this for all women. They've never done a Medea like that. They're cheating themselves by not letting me do these roles.

I never heard Coen brothers get defensive, ever. You get with these filmmakers doing the hardest work in the world, and they're not defensive. They're happy together, they crack jokes together, they have different opinions - and it doesn't bother them that they have different opinions. So no wonder their work is so good, because you're getting two for the price of one.