As you get older naked stuff [on film] gets easier. It's more to do with the role than what men in the audience think. There's a liberation about it.

Hollywood is a very small world; the people who matter matter, and the people who don't matter are just like nothing.

All you have to do is to look like crap on film and everyone thinks you're a brilliant actress. Actually, all you've done is look like crap.

There is that awful moment when you realize that you're falling in love. That should be the most joyful moment, and actually it's not. It's always a moment that's full of fear because you know, as night follows day, the joy is going to rapidly be followed by some pain or other. All the angst of a relationship.

The control and understanding of our personal fears is one of the most important undertakings of our lives.

A war film can be propaganda and they're very valuable as propaganda, as we realized in Britain in the Second World War. Film as propaganda is a very valuable tool. It can also demonize, which is the dangerous side of a war film as propaganda. But there are war films that are not propaganda. It's just saying 'This is what it's like.' For 99 percent of us we don't know what it's like. We have no idea. So to reveal that to the audience is powerful.

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back 40 years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' They would say, 'No.'