Don't be afraid and don't let the past affect your present.
The thing is, if people get it right away, I just don't think you're making art. I think you're making something they're comfortable with. You have to challenge people. You know, it has to be new. It has to be something they haven't seen before. Just bring them something they haven't seen before. They aren't going to love it right away because they haven't seen it before. So they have to take a minute, you know?
When we get to A League Of Their Own, I have to be Geena Davis' little sister who wants to be like her and wants everything that she has and is jealous and upset and mad. Well, that was easy. I mean, she has an Academy Award. I think I can be upset about that. She's 99 feet tall and she's drop-dead gorgeous and she's all feminine and pretty. I had to pretend I couldn't run as fast as her. That was hard.
Directing is genderless. The only thing...I love men.
I live in Venice Beach so I see this all day, every day. Some people just ignore people with mental illness, pretend they're not there. They don't say "good morning" to them; they don't act like they're human. They'll get locked up, or just ignored. It's just awful.
During the football scene in the Point Break they were playing, and I wasn't slated to be in the football scene. I was like, "I want to play!" So they said, "Go play." It was just a gas. There was a responsibility of being the leading lady - there's a responsibility to that.
That's what they do to whatever I was - 19 or something. You're the baby hooker. You can ask any woman my age and we've all played baby hookers.
That's something that I learned when I was homeless. Hotels are awesome because they are going to let you in and you can use the bathroom and when you're young and pretty you can probably use the pool. Somebody might by you a drink.
In Point Break, I was the only woman in there, so it was pretty easy to feel like a sex symbol. You've got all the naked, wet, Hot Chili Peppers, right? You've got Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves and then the whole crew. It was me and 50 dudes the whole time. It was awesome!
When I was in the writers' room, all these writers were like, "Ugh, another star that they gave a writing-producing credit to." But then within like an hour, they were like, "You're really a writer." "Yeah, I really am. I'm a writer, and a director, and a producer, and an actor, and a painter, and I do all that stuff in the Lush Life." It was great.
There was a guy with mental illness in the middle of the street just yelling and hollering. I have a number that I can call - it's not 911 - to tell them, "You need to help this man get out of the street." But you have to be that person, you have to pick up the phone, you have to do it; you can't just walk by and act like they're not people. They're somebody's kid, somebody's dad, somebody's brother.
When I was only in the first episode of Orange Is The New Black, I'm thinking by lunchtime I'm ready for my contract, like, "What's up?" I finally just spoke up and said, "What's the deal? This is the first episode. I'd love to be on your show." And they said, "Oh, Lori, we filmed out of order, we already filmed the whole season two." So I had to wait six whole months to come back again.
It was like the first time I'd ever seen Hollywood just really not do the right thing. We filmed Free Willy in Mexico. I'd come in a really nice car from my hotel, and we'd have to drive around all the crew that was sleeping in the parking lot. People making their breakfast on the ground. It was because there was a whale there that was in a little tank. It just felt gross. It felt really bad. They didn't free that whale for, damn... at least 10 years later. The poor whale had horrible psoriasis all over him, and his fin didn't work.
I had seen Orange Is The New Black show on Netflix and the first thing that came to my mind was, "Why am I not on this show? It's just irritating me right now." So I made some phone calls and told them, "I want to be on your show." And they found a spot for me.
What the studio didn't understand is that surfing is about a billion times more dangerous than skydiving. They would not allow the boys to skydive, but they allowed us to surf in pipeline in Hawaii. Nine-hundred foot waves. So we're out there in the middle where the greatest surfers in the world surf. They have these long lenses on from the beach, so they can't see anything. They are just shooting our faces in the Point Break.
