Theater's wonderful because it's visceral, and it's happening in front of you, but you never get that close. So the close-up is a great privilege of film.
My dad says that when I was two or three I used to go out dressed as a different character every day. I remember thinking it was perfectly normal to wear different coloured shoes and carry a pink umbrella. But now I've got a goddaughter of that age; I realise it's not normal at all.
American culture is very good at interpersonal relationships and people skills, whereas we're incredibly adept at academics and straightforward 19th-century Victorian education.
Everyone's parents were famous actors at my school, pretty much! I think I went to school with Paris Hilton when I was three. That's what L.A. is, though - it's an industry town. You go to school with kids and you think, 'Well that's normal, they make movies.'
I really don't mind what people assume about me. I really think that my brain is my private thing. I don't need the approval of people. I don't need people to think I'm intelligent. And I'm not that intelligent.
I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.
Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.
My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.
