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 do think my mother was a bit overprotective, not in any sordid way, but just normally. She certainly might say to me, "You know, Laura, I don't have a good feeling about that guy. I don't know if I want you to go out with him."

As someone who has been asked to ask David Lynch what his movies mean for 25 years, I'm very careful about asking artists what their art means.

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.

We like our archetypes and heroes to be what they are at face value. And life doesn't work out like that

Look, if somebody said tomorrow, "We're making a Lethal Weapon formula movie, but it's incredibly well-written and for two women," I'm not going to say, "Oh, forget it, it's formula." I got an idea the other day, that somebody should write a typical formula movie, a Lethal Weapon, and make it with me and my dad. It could be all father-and-daughter capers. But I'd want someone really weird to direct it.

Nick Сage and I can't make love in movie? That's scary. And our hero? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Using a body as a shield against bullets? Hey - the world's a big place, and people get away with what they get away with, but to attack David Lynch for doing things I've seen in many movies, that's weird.