I can cook a few things. I always save the same recipes to impress my friends, and I always do two or three things, so they think I can cook. But I don't know how to do anything else.

Unfortunately, I am very aware of editing and I look at the monitor too much. Sometimes the monitor can become your worst enemy because you can, consciously or unconsciously, start editing yourself.

Pedro Almodóvar asked me to watch italian films again as homework to look at the energy of all those women from the Italian neo-realist films. A lot of them had those characters that represented motherhood. For some reason, in the '50s in Italy, the mother figure was very important - and my character needed to have that energy.

I realized that when two people function well together at work, it doesn't matter if they hadn't seen each other for years. What they had before was still intact.

My definition of beauty is without rules. It can be the face of a beautiful 90-year-old woman that is full of stories and emotion. Beauty is what somebody's eyes communicate.

Sometimes you will do a close-up for a scene in the morning where you are totally distraught, then shoot the rest of that scene seven hours later. How do you hang on to that feeling all day without burning up, without going so far that you have nothing left to give when the cameras roll again?

It's very much like a torture sometimes, the process of trying to get rid of an accent.