Acting's fun, but life's more important

I don't buy into any of that hogwash. They put that out to sell tickets. It's just a classic horror movie, with the Greek drama formula of good versus evil, and lots of fear.

Mostly, in The Great Waldo Pepper I remember the lovely Ed Herrmann befriending me and taking care of me. I was crying a lot. I was a real mess when we made that. But this is all such ancient history, Jesus Lord. Was this before or after The Sting?

I'm a very good screamer, that's for sure.

We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.

I got a reputation for being sort of nuts and difficult, because I was at that point, so I wasn't much in demand. And also, on the basic level, I'd made a lot of movies that didn't make money. And if you make movies that don't make money - I mean, it is a business, after all - you are not in demand.

Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was made all about drugs, when to most of us, that just meant pot and magic mushrooms. He made it seem like we were all shooting heroin into our eyeballs. But that's part of the whole '60s and what it represented: feminism and civil rights and trying to stop the war. Hopefully we're starting to see some of that optimism again, through the excitement around Barack Obama.