John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence as a play. He said, "Hey, I wrote you a play." And I said, "Great, let's read it." I read it and I said, "John, I couldn't do this every night and twice on Wednesday and Saturday".

I think that I was lucky to have that period of time [ like coming to New York] because everything was so exciting and new.

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.

Of course, much easier to do a film when you're doing an extremely emotional part than it is doing it onstage over and over especially.

I love independent filmmaking. I don't agree with a lot of it, but that's the point.

Never in my life have I ever even thought about anything else [ being anything other than an actress].

So many people mistakenly think that the rest of his [John Cassavetes] pictures and the ones we did were improvised, which isn't true. He wrote all the rest of them.