I like being in movies that have a great story. I'm not so interested in being a Hollywood star. It's a job, you know. When you wake up at six in the morning every day for a week, it feels like hard work.
I mean, I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time, then you're considered a failure. But it's like, 'Well, are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'
It's not like I sit around watching my movies again and again, but I've never quite believed actors when they say they don't watch themselves.
It's a funny thing: You want so badly for people to see what you do - you're proud of it - and I like the effect that movies have on people. But the attention can also make me uncomfortable.
Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.
I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?
The reason I chose the movies that I did was based on where they were being filmed.
I mean, why am I considered an 'it girl?' Because I'm in a lot of movies right now or am on the covers of magazines? I just hope there is something solid behind that. Because here's the thing with 'it girl' status. It's great and amazing that anybody is saying that at all. But how long does that last?
It's like why people read scary books or go see scary movies. Because it creates a distance. They're scared, but they're not going to get hurt.
I wanted to be in Jim Carrey comedy movies before I met him. I wanted to be a comedian on Stage 19, yukking it up.
I wouldn't like to be in movies. Movie people are strange. They live a different life than musicians do.
My movies just kind of sneak up on you. I don't have to worry too much about what everybody is going to say. Anyway, I really don't pay attention to what the world says about my movies. I just care about what my buddies think.
I'm not looking to get away from anything. I like what I've done. I like what I get to do and I enjoy working with my friends. I loved those movies, but this is incredible.
Kids end up seeing my movies anyway but some of the mothers get mad at me so I figured I'd make one that I can't get yelled at for.
I don't know many women who can relate to Sharon Stone and the kind of movies she does. I don't know a lot of guys who can relate to Tom Cruise's movies because they're on a kind of fantastic level.
There are some movies that I would like to forget, for the rest of my life. But even those movies teach me things.
I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.
I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.
Movies are movies, and I don't think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense.
I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies really twisted.
I love these movies where it's just about the film. You don't have my face on the poster. It's all about the movie. I like that.
It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.
The movies have got more corporate, they're making fewer movies in general, and those they are making are all $200-$300m tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen.
Usually I do everything reverse. I practice something in movies and then I try it in real life.
I don't want to produce anymore small or independent movies because it's just too hard these days.
I was never into the popular school or clique or anything. Then I started doing movies when I was in high school, so then I got popular. Then the girls paid attention to you who didn't before.
My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.
I think being self-referential is really narcissistic. Who's to say anybody's even thinking of you that much? But some of these movies that I've done, people still recite lines to me, even 20 years later.
It's like those high-school yearbook photos that everyone would rather not see: Oh my God, look at that mullet hair. I have those photos too, but for me, they're, like, entire movies. And they show them on cable.
Most movies, once the action starts there's no more characters. You say a couple of dumb lines and then there's just explosions until the end.
Being alone is scarier than any boogey man and the reason why I don't choose to see Horror movies as a rule.
You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.
The financial implode is bound to be reflected in the movies that are being made, there's no question.
A huge part of acting in movies is appetite. You do your best work when you've got a lot of appetite and you really want to embrace something. When you get tired, you don't have that hunger.
Ultimately, to have a career in movies, to a certain extent, certainly in England, you can't sustain a career in just English movies.
A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there.
In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies.
I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.
If I wanted to make spy movies for the rest of my life, that would be one thing, but I don't want to just make spy movies.
Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.
It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.