You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.

I'm just a relationship girl. I fall in love and I usually have long relationships. I like getting to know people well and having substantive, long relationships.

I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.

Everybody's got a dud. You can't get out of it. That's the price of admission: you'll get some duds. You'll get some things where you missed a little. It's a crap feeling when you're going through it. But the main thing is as long as you're not doing anything for cynical reasons, then you'll be okay.

I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.

I think it's really hard to work in a city where you live too, because I get so absorbed with the movie that I become a bad friend and a bad participant in my own life.

I'm not someone who's an immigrant who's struggling in that way, but between New York and L.A., I had someone tell me very early on, "If you're going to be broke anywhere, it's better to be broke in L.A. At least the weather is nice." I was like, "You're right." I didn't take them up on that.