My strategy to show caricature idea of American youth culture, which I think worked after talking about it for so many years, is that I had only a few things. I wanted to buy my own wardrobe for Rock 'N' Roll High School, which of course they said "Yes" to, because their clothing budget was $200, and I ended up spending my whole salary - which I think was about $2,100 - on my clothes. And also, any time I was onscreen, I wanted to have as much energy as I possibly could. I think it just really worked for the character.

John Carpenter was very gentle. He was very tender. He really liked talking to actors. He really wanted you to be comfortable. He waited until you were ready to do the scene, and he has a lot of confidence.

Carrie was a pretty big-budget movie at a real studio, with a director that had already done a bunch of things and had some notoriety, and Stephen King was the writer. He was banned from the set, but that was kind of an A-plus production. So that was my first experience.

We've become great friends with Rob Zombie, and I gave him my original script for Halloween for his 40th birthday. Like, Nicolas Cage was there with a shrunken head he brought as a gift, all these things, and I'm thinking, "What can I give Rob Zombie? This is very weird." And I just happened to look at my pile of scripts and I went, "My kids don't need all these. I think I'll give him my original Halloween script, since he told me that was his favorite movie, and I was his favorite actress from that time period." I said, "He deserves to have that."

For Coca-Cola, they wanted a hippie-looking girl to walk around the city with a bucket of chicken sitting in Central Park, sitting on Central Park South, walking along all these different areas of New York that people are familiar with, and just eating this bucket of chicken. I got that commercial too. I think it was just part of my personality that was different from just a regular, nice-looking girl that was more of a model-y type. I injected a little more energy into everything I did.

Ive always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

With Halloween, the director was this genius wonder boy who was the writer, director, producer, along with his girlfriend. They were this team, and they were making this small movie, and it was just completely different, but it was really inspiring and a lot of fun, and also allowed me to do a lot of improvisation, because they just depended on the girls to expand their parts to bring some real life, being girls ourselves, to the characters.