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.

My father is an atheist. My mother is Buddhist. They encouraged my siblings and me to take the best part of other religions to make our own belief system.

I think that as actresses - and I've definitely gone through this in a really bizarre way, because I worked so much and was really lucky with the roles that I got when I was younger - I remember hearing the older actors saying, "It gets tough," and thinking, "Really? I can't imagine."

Actors do these really gross, gun-'em-down movies, and I always wonder why. They're not good movies. And it's like, "Why are you doing them? Aren't you rich enough?"

It's an indication of how cynical our society has become that any kind of love story with a sad theme is automatically ridiculed as sentimental junk.

People think that they just want movies like Pretty Woman, when really they - at least the ones that I know personally - have been waiting for something that doesn't completely insult them.

When I was young, I was really, really obsessed with Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. Because my mom was a projectionist in college, she was somehow able to get a real projector. And she had some connections, so she would get real prints, and we'd put up a sheet. The first movies I saw were To Kill a Mockingbird [1962], Gigi [1958], A Woman Under the Influence [1974]. Then when I was old enough to be able to rent movies, I went through a very big Cassavetes phase.