The best Christmas present I got from my husband was a week to do whatever I wanted.

I guess maybe I was hired to play in the Doll House because of my dinner scene in The Sixth Sense, which has been scrutinized a thousand times as to whether you know Bruce Willis is dead, or whether I'm talking to myself. I think that maybe if that could be my forte, to do a scene and be able to say it could be read this way or that way.

My parents' long and happy marriage was a great ideal to live up to, but a tough one.

I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.

There's this absurd situation on a movie set where your trailer's here and the set is here and the lunch tent is here, and you're not allowed to get yourself from these three places.

We had an ancient Russian acting coach at my drama school who said the worst offense you could commit was to let your subtext show. That is the point of acting, is to be saying one thing and not be allowed by society or your predicament to show what you're really feeling. In a way, I think that's why the therapy generation has killed script writing, because all you ever get is people going, "Hi, I'm feeling really angry right now."

Working with Roman Polanski is funny. It's like anything in life - someone warns you that something's going to be amazing or difficult or awful, and you say, "I can do that. I can cope with that." And then when you're in the middle of it, it may be joyful or tricky, but it's never difficult in the way you think it's going to be difficult.