I got to work with Gena Rowlands when I did Night on Earth, and the movie was just you and someone else in a car, you're just hanging out. There's nobody else, just a walkie-talkie. It was a night shoot, and it was only a week or ten days. But it was incredible just being in her presence.

What's awful about being famous and being an actress is when people come up to you and touch you. That's scary, and they just seem to think it's okay to do it, like you're public property.

One thing you have to have when you act is energy.

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls.

The older you get, the more yourself you can be and the less worried you are about what other people think.

I grew up in San Francisco. My parents were not hippies; they were writers. They were very active politically, but on the intellectual side, not on the "taking drugs in a field and listening to the Grateful Dead" side.

You look at people like Gena Rowlands, but she had [John] Cassavetes to write these amazing roles for her.