We're like the raw food movement in cinema - so determined to give people things that do some good, that they recognize as real.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?

The last time I did anything like this [special powers] was with the Narnia film with two swords, the same but different.

I remember when I first started to be photographed, people couldn't understand how it was possible to go around with no eyelashes, no eyebrows. Now it's much more accepted for people not to wear eyelashes or lipstick or whatever they do, but then it was quite freaky. Um, a kind of boiled look.

George [Clooney] and I do have the aim one day to be in a film where we say one nice thing to each other. Hopefully one day.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.

In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?".