Working with Bernardo Bertolucci was one of the greatest highlights of my whole life. It was such an incredible opportunity for me.

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

At a certain point I became really frustrated with modeling, like, why do I have to go home after school and get dressed up and put makeup on my face, and then go to a photographer's studio where there's 15 other girls with their books and have to prove myself? A lot of people don't think of it that way, but modeling's a hard job, physically and emotionally.

To me, the coolest are the terminally uncool.

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.

There is no definition of beauty, but when you can see someone's spirit coming through, something unexplainable, that's beautiful to me.

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.