For me, the most important thing is that I feel comfortable with the actor that I'm working with and I'm able to talk to them.

Men aren't asked about age. Men aren't asked about their children. Not that these things aren't important, but I do feel like it becomes reductive when a woman's life becomes, 'Talk to me about your kids and how you feel about plastic surgery.'

Sarah Palin's real quality is that she is her own best creation.

Apart from anything else, I got to work with Jennifer Lawrence. She’s a lovely girl. I know people often say things like that in interviews, but she really is. While she may be young, she doesn’t feel at all precocious. Instead, she’s smart and funny and terrific at connecting with people. She just blew me away.

A mid life crisis is nothing but getting to the point where you go, have I done what I wanted to do? Am I living the life that I want to live? Am I appreciating what I have? If you don't get to that point developmentally, you're not doing it correctly. The people who get to that age and haven't reassessed usually haven't faced the fact that that's where they are.

Life is full of compromises, and whether or not you're willing to negotiate.

You're in a movie, so you have to think about how something plays. It's not like you're thinking about how an audience is going to react. You're trying to present the story. You're trying to illuminate the lives of these people in the story. So I'm thinking about how my behavior as this character best illuminates what's going on with them in this moment in time. I always say it's sort of the director's job. People think that the directors direct actors. No. Really, what the director's doing is directing the audience's eye through the film.