I just think it's really funny and entertaining. I mean, I don't necessarily take them really seriously - I don't even think a lot of really good films get seen. But I don't think that's what it's about. I mean, how amazing was Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For A Dream ? Especially as she was acting with herself most of the time. I don't understand how a performance like that can't win. I was so affected by that movie that I had to turn it off. I felt as if I was on drugs and my heart was about to leap out of my body.

I was always a little bit chubbier than everyone else. But I would feel pain for some of the other girls, who were so young and felt they had to be so skinny. They'd be living in the model apartments, totally wrapped up in this whole world. And it made me more sad than anything.

I have been working since I was 14, nonstop.

Being a teenage model was lot of fun, like playing dress-up. I'd feel ugly and awkward and chubby, and they'd transform me. Not that that makes everything better. Then my mom shopped the pictures around, I guess, and the agencies started calling. I wound up going with a little agency, Spectrum. It all happened really quickly, I started modeling for magazines like YM and Seventeen, and I did a couple of bigger things like Italian Vogue.

I definitely think the girls look too skinny now. I'm friends with models Helena Christensen and Linda Evangelista, and I remember Linda telling me that when she was a model in the nineties, a sample size was a 6 or an 8. Now a sample dress size is a 0 or a 2. That's pretty alarming. There's a lot of pressure on the models. It's not healthy. I can't even imagine what that's like.

I don't think a lot of really good films get seen.

I just remember saying to myself that I'd much rather do movies than modeling, and that it was worth a try. I didn't really know anything about it. I hadn't seen many movies, or so-called, good movies. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Star Wars and Night of the Living Dead. When I got more curious about the movies, I thought they were something you had to learn about and go to school for and read every book.