The trouble with audition process is, when you're an unemployed actor, it's the only time you get to act, and it can be quite fun. If you feel in control of the material and you feel that the people are pleased to see you and are excited by you auditioning for them, it can be a really rewarding process. But it can also be a very humiliating process.

As an actor, you're just taking temperature. I am anyway, all the time, and responding appropriately. I was again cast very last-minute for Rushmore and met Wes Anderson, this quite physically and socially awkward man who didn't really talk to me much, a precocious and intelligent young boy. And Bill Murray. And we were sort of left in this bizarre hotel together and taken to strange locations around Houston. That was quite an isolating experience.

When The Sixth Sense was the No. 1 movie in America, I had a Canadian boyfriend whose only assets at the time were a guitar and a van. I don't know what I was thinking.

I am the worst judge of how a movie is going to do. I always have great and ambitious hopes, but none of them see the light of day.

I think it's quite lucky that I lead this lifestyle, and in fact, my career's only gotten better as I've looked older, because it ages you, the uncertainty.

For me, selfishly, The Postman didn't kill my career. It meant I didn't shoot straight and painfully into the limelight, but Rushmore came out of it. No one would have known where I was to cast me in Rushmore had I not been in The Postman. Because they shared a producer. Nor would I have been in The Sixth Sense. Nor would I be speaking to you now if Kevin Costner hadn't cast me in The Postman.

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."