I'm an animal rights activist because I believe we won't have a planet if we continue to behave toward other species the way we do.

A vital film that needed to be made at this point in history and has been made magnificently.

For my entire career, I wanted to be a director. When I was in the theater, it was very difficult to get directing jobs, and I fell into the acting by default. I got in the habit of accepting whatever came my way. Not things that I disagreed with, though. It's not like I had aspirations - well, I did have aspirations to play Hamlet, which I ended up doing.

I prefer to have playback, but sometimes, you can't have that under most circumstances. First, it is expensive because you need a playback operator and secondly, it threatens a lot of directors. I only watch my performance. I see what is necessary for me so that I can see it right at the moment and I can fix it. That appeals to me a great deal.

What happens when you're naked is that people get that you're really just a human being. There are parts of it that are pretty appalling, and there are parts that are okay. That's what it looks like. If you can embrace and accept what people look like in the altogether, it's not so difficult to accept them with their clothes on.

When I did 'Babe' I wanted to talk about animal rights without going through some convoluted justifications about using animal products.

If a kid ever realized what was involved in factory farming, they would never touch meat again.