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.

Patrick Swayze was risk-taking - because he not only did a transvestite, but in Donnie Darko, he played a pedophile! Talk about a risky thing for a movie star, and he jumped right in. We even shot some of those video sequences of his character out on his ranch. I mean, he opened his heart and his ranch to us. He was just an awesome guy.

At Rain Man, I was 38. And before that, I had really just started working when I was 36. I was very late. So I've got time, right? As long as I stay healthy and eat right.

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.

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.

The brilliant costume designer Mary Zorphres had done all this research on West Texas in 1980. Every woman looked like that. At a certain age, they would get their hair cut off, let the gray go in, get that permanent, and wear those big glasses. She gave me a beanie bra so my boobs would hang down, and these old dresses. My hat's off to her, because I thought it was perfect for the movie. It was so great to have some comic relief right at that moment. No Country For Old Men is such an intense film.

My husband and I can't get through dinner without being defensive. We've been married 24 years, and I love my husband to death, but sometimes I say, "What are we? Two injured creatures who can't talk to each other without going, like, 'Ahhh!'?"