I love playing an alien.

I just feel that getting out there physically and protecting New York, putting my arms around everyone and protecting them... to see this happen to our city and our community.

When I'm making the movie, I absolutely do. I work so hard, and out of the raw material that is the script and talks I have with the director, the writer, I create, I hope, a very specific person who wouldn't have otherwise existed. However, do I then attach and hang on to the finished product? No. The experience of the creation of the character is what feeds me, what excites me, challenges me.

Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.

Here's a vice: I say yes to too many things. I wish I had the guilty pleasure of saying no. My goal is to try to do less, but more fully.

I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way.

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film... But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so... I love going back and forth.