I'm very connected to my own family, and maybe I like to explore the feelings that come up in families. I'm fortunate that my parents taught me to look further into why I might feel a certain way; it was normal to expose things.

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.

It would be great to make a movie that had the style of a great '30s film or a movie of David's Lynch or some other director I love that could also make money, because that would say to the corporation, "Yes, you can make money and still do art." But it's tricky.

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 really don't consider myself to be a conventional Hollywood star. I've never really been marketed by the big studios to do mass market box office films.

I'd never done nudity in a movie; I've never sort of condoned it for myself, but David Lynch wanted it, and I was completely comfortable with it because that love story was so protected. There's never a moment where you feel anything is exploited.

I love to rescue animals.... The pounds were so crowded they were putting animals down almost immediately. Seven thousand dogs were put to sleep.