Every film is its own experience, its own planet, its own family. It seems infinite when you're working on it, and then it's suddenly very finite, and it's done.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted. I think a lot of women are contained within the parentheses of shoulds and role-play. It's all about entitlement and history. It's all about upper-body strength - and exacting your will.

I do feel that if it's not on the page, there's no hope of it getting to the stage. You really can't take a cat and turn it into a dog, or try and get lemons off an apple tree, or what have you. Sometimes there's this real naïveté that people possess, where they want you to infuse a scene with a certain quality, and it's like an apology. "I read the script, didn't you? What's the agenda here?"

When I was 12, all I wanted was to be good at school, and to do something admirable, something you can't take away from me because I'm not popular or beautiful enough.

I've found there to be a tremendous amount of East Coast snobbery in the journalism world.

You'll never have any mental muscle if you don't have any heavy stuff to pick up.

When I was growing up in New York City, my father was a taxi driver for a time.