I like movies about women behaving badly, because women behave badly just like men, and we're not always adorable and cute about it.
You keep learning how to let go and to live the life that you actually have, as opposed to the life you thought you were going to have.
Let your characters talk to each other and do things. Spend time with them - they'll tell you who they are and what they're up to.
I think when you're a teenager, you always feel as if life is happening somewhere else - it certainly isn't happening to you. And then you get to the place where you think your life is supposed to be, and you look around and realize it doesn't exist.
I didn't know the city at all, but I was so happy to be in New York I cried. I was so excited.
I like things that look like mistakes.
I've never had a plan, I've always done things from instinct.
I’m not saying that everyone needs to be celibate, but you don’t need a romance to complete a story about a woman
I feel like most people aren't either/or, they're both/and. You're both magnanimous and petty. You're both kind and cruel. You're never just one thing.
I think the problem with growing up and idealizing self-destructive artists is that you only see the beauty they created rather than all the pain that went along with it.
I like people who love books and movies and art and want to talk about it all the time, because that's basically what I want to talk about. Intellectuals that are funny.
I think being attracted to mistakes is one of the things that film can capture in a way that theater can't. Film can capture a moment of spontaneous life that will never be captured again. I like a lot of structure and a lot of lines, but then within that I make room for things to happen that you couldn't have predicted.
I had dreams, but I didn't have the sense that they would necessarily work out. They seemed very far-fetched.
There are a million little things, but one of the best ways to get to know characters is to just put them in situations and see what they say.
I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.
Noah Baumbach does more takes than any director I've ever worked with. He runs a very quiet set and he runs a very hard working set. He has such an intense level of dedication to what's happening that he cultivates a group of people around him who have an equal level of dedication. Nobody asks, "When is lunch?" That's just not part of our sets. It's complete immersion. He has a 'no cell phone' rule. Nobody checks their cell phone. Nobody reads on set. It's like, "If you're there, you're there. If you're not on board with that, don't work on this movie."
There's no such thing as cheating when you're 18. That's just true. I'm very endeared by this notion of the way adolescents practice being grown ups and practice for adult morality. I remember when I was 15 and people were starting to date and someone cheated on someone. They'd say, 'He cheated on her. You know what they say, once a cheater always a cheater.'
I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.
You feel sadness for time passing. New York is a city that keeps reinventing itself, and I love it so much.
As a kid, I was a big reader. Books and theater were the way I understood the world, and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.
In relationships, you learn a million things. I'm sure a therapist can tell you about it.
I think as an actress, I prefer having a character on the page. It allows you to be more invested in actually creating a whole person. It's easier when you're not trying to come up with your next line on the spot.
I love New York, but it's a rough city. It's not dangerous now the way it was in the 70's or the 80's, but it's still a rough city. It's hard to hack it there. Life is harder than it is on the West Coast. To be able to deal with that, you have to have a lot of aspirational feelings pinned on being there.
I'm far too middle-class to morally object to a paying job.
I think... I love Los Angeles. I live in New York, and I love New York as well, but I think Los Angeles is a place where if you have the right person with you, there are all these little worlds that you would never guess by just looking at the exterior of what the city is.
