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.

It sounds like a cliché, but mother is really one of my closest friends, and so's my dad. He and I weren't very close when I was younger, but now we're best friends.

Virginia Mayo had kind of a small role in The Best Years of Our Lives, but you got the whole character in one scene. Where are those parts? I was talking to somebody about great actors: Morgan Freeman's name came up, Forest Whitaker, Denzel Washington. And I realized, there're no black actresses. Where's there a black actress who's been extremely successful in the past 10 years?

I was raised by an actress, and I watched all those women turn 60 and ask, "Should I get face work?" And my mother and Anne Bancroft said to each other, "We are who we are, and we're not going to fall into that."

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.

It would be great to make a movie that had the style of a great '30's film.

It's a strange world, as David Lynch would say