I guess it's a pretty common experience while making a movie. You have to let go of the result and just hang on to the experience and the process, where each role takes you to a different country, as it were: You're shipwrecked on this new island, you have no clothes, you have to figure out how you're going to live in this new character. All of that turns me on.
What I love about Neill's Blomkamp work is that his stories are small human stories. But what's interesting about Neill's movies is that they're set in the future but they're so incredibly timely that it feels like maybe in the present in the next dimension. It feels like it's happening now. The universe is very recognizable, in many ways.
I think indie films are really important, because they show the studios and the audiences when they see them, great stories. Really interesting, small stories.
Once I put that wig on, I didn't say an intelligent thing for four months. My voice went up. I walked differently. I'd ask incredibly stupid questions.
I can do five things at once. I'm tapping my foot, I'm opening my mouth and talking to you, and looking at the bulletin board.
I wouldn't recommend it, because art school is a funny business. Yes, if you can find a situation where they'll give you money to live at the school and do whatever you want and pay for all your materials, if you're a painter or maybe a filmmaker, do it. But acting should be the most fun thing in the world; you're surrounded by other people who are as obsessed with Anton Chekhov as you are.
It's rather rare when you play an older character in a movie in a supporting role to even get an arc.
As an actor, the second and last ones were interesting for me. Because those parts had the most change in playing someone who was both light and dark, sort of Jekyl and Hyde.
I've been very fortunate to be able to jump around. I just did this really wonderful film called Map of the World. That was a real, amazing, dramatic story. Then I did a movie called Company Men, a little comedy about the Bay of Pigs.
Secretly, I had always wanted to go to Vegas, and have my own really bad act!
I was at an all-girls' school, so there were a lot of us who were really awkward. I was this tall when I was 11, so I was really awkward and self-conscious. No one would really have wanted to be mean to me. I was too unimportant.
I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way.
We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.
I'm very happy with the opportunities I've had.
My husband is from Hawaii and his father who was also born in Hawaii was a teenager when Pearl Harbor happened, right before church and he ran up and got on the roof of his grandfather's house and watched the planes go over.
I actually have a long apology letter from Robert Brustein, saying, "I'm so sorry this happened to you. I didn't realize the people who were running the acting department at the drama school hated actors." They did. And they were fired when I graduated.
I love the role of Ripley.
For the camera, particularly, I feel like - I think that, as human faces become older, they become more interesting.
With Alien, because we always use a different director, each one kind of stands on its own. So I guess it's possible for them to make another one, but we have no plans.
I love working with young people and young filmmakers, and I love working on first films. I think it's cool. It's fun. I just take it as it comes.
I always find it particularly difficult to work in New York because there are so many things to do.
Art school is a very difficult thing to run in a generous, humane way, because academic power is somehow very corrupting.
When I went to Yale, I thought it would be like in Stenford 24 hours a day. Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale School of Drama and founder of the Yale Repertory Theater was there, and we did all this very serious - I would go so far as to say completely humorless - Eastern European drama, as well as August Strindberg, and Henrik Ibsen, we weren't allowed to do William Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. I was not in the right place.
After I left Yale, we were all doing these mad plays off - off Broadway. And I got back to that feeling I had from college, of everyone making up in front of one cracked mirror, which is what I loved - the scrappy theater idea. I think off-off Broadway healed me, made me an actor again, and I was in so many different crazy shows.
James Cameron thinks we can do anything. He'll let you try anything. There are very few geniuses in the world, let alone in our business, and he's certainly one of them.
