Los Angeles is like a beauty parlor at the end of the universe.

It's very difficult to find the time or the money for people to organize rehearsals for some movies. It staggers me how little preparation often goes into these scenes which are difficult and complicated. You think, "God, it's crazy. I've never met this person before and here I am having to work at how to do a whole performance on the set." It was great to have a few days of just talking to Michael [Caine] and Daniel [Barber] and thinking about the characters and the relationship between them before we started shooting.

I'm an optimist by nature, myself, I think.

Despite being extremely professional, Michael Caine has a giggle which was lethal for me because once you catch his eyes, once you realize the other person is a giggler too, it's curtains.

So far I haven't really been prominent enough to get critical attention focused on me. So, of course, I fully expect bad reviews, but I will be wracked with misery as a result.

I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

Lots of people there seemed to be in denial, in absolute denial, of death - everybody's pretending that death doesn't happen in L.A.; if you do enough exercise and take enough wheatgrass and have your pill every day, you might not die.