In the olden days, of course, cigarette companies would pay to have their product advertised in movies and to have actors smoke cigarettes.[Ronald Reagan used to do it.]

I always wanted to be a rock'n'roll star.

And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

Assuming that all bad girls smoke. I don't think so. I've been around a lot of bad girls who don't smoke, you know, so I think it's easy to put a cigarette into, you know, into anyone's hands and say, well that makes them a bad boy or a bad girl. There are many more creative ways from a writerly point of view to do that.

I was a militant smoker, and in my case, I think I particularly used smoking because what I felt was a kind of politically correct big brother assault on smoking.

I've seen Joe take on many battles, cancer being one of them, and the determination that he has, and he won't stop, he's not going to make one announcement and write one editorial and go away.

I do want to make a special appeal to women movie stars to, I think, have a special responsibility these days to stop smoking, not to do it up on screen because the example that's being set is really an awful example.