I first travelled to Africa at the end of 1996 and was immediately captivated. I had planned on a three-week trip, and I ended up staying two months.

[The director's idea for the film was:] A young American or English girl goes to Tuscany to visit English expatriates. She is on a mission to lose her virginity. That's a mission easily accomplished, if that's the only mission. The story had to be more complicated than that. Because there is so little happening dramatically, there had to be something to keep you curious.

...it occurred to her how some people continued through no design of one's own to be in one's life while others might initially enter in a sort of blaze and seem to change everything but then might not stay around.

There is no good reason. Don't waste your life waiting for good reasons...You'll wait and wait.

I first travelled to Africa at the end of 1996 and was immediately captivated. I had planned on a three-week trip, and I ended up staying two months.

After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.