I made a commitment to myself: that I wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to do films that make a difference. Whether it makes someone laugh, or it has a moral to the story - it doesn't have to be an ethical film, but it has to move people. If it doesn't excite me, it's not worth doing - it's better to work on myself and my own life and wait until another great thing comes along.

I wanted to go to Jupiter. That was my plan from day one, and David Lynch gave me the ticket.

I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.

I'm friends with Renny Harlan, who directed Die Hard 2, and I will say, I thought it was beautifully done. What I loved about it was that the bad guys are basically American political figures. They don't have East German accents or whatever.

I like movies about longing and desperation, and dark and light things, stories about people struggling to raise children, and to have relationships and be intimate with each other.

In Smooth Talk it was a much more intuitive search - I was only 17 at the time, and I wasn't aware, as women are when they get a little older, that there's always a side of a woman that likes a man from the other side of the tracks. We all have an attraction to what's different from us.

I went to a Catholic school. The private school was good - the teachers wanted all of us to have the freedom to think for ourselves. The education was good at the Catholic school, but you only got that one ideology.