To me, being creative is a very fragile thing. The environment in which one can create is a very particular one, and somehow, I've always felt the need to be very protective of that.
Being somebody who's like a theater geek that I am, I can just go right back to Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles: they were writing about gods and goddesses versus humans, and how gods could distort, pervert, or help people get what they want.
Sometimes it's the lead, but there are not always leads out there, so then it's an interesting supporting character, or there's a lot of dough, although that happens less and less. Let's have a good laugh about that one.
I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.
Crazy people are my people? Really? I think that's silly. That's another one of those pigeonhole things. Lay somebody on an ironing board and put a scalding hot iron on them, get that going real good: 'Oh, this is who Holly Hunter is.'
Man, I would have loved to have been fully cognisant of the power of Janis Joplin. I would have loved to have been part of the revolution.
I think that the audience feels a real connection with Zoe Kazan because she's so instantly lovable.
I'm not a great Maureen Dowd fan, because I really find her poisonous, on the record.
There are ways that women absorb situations, and I think women are different kinds of listeners. They're different in terms of how they parse out problem solving.
Do I trust myself? Sometimes I don't even know, but I can only just kind of throw my hat in the ring and hope for the best. Depending on how much I trust the other people is how much freedom I can allow myself to have on that particular set.
It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.
It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it.
In many parts, I start from the outside and then it triggers things within. For 'The Piano,' I went, 'I'm going to learn these piano pieces. I'm going to learn this sign language, and I'm going to do them all day every day, five days a week.' It was a totally physical thing.
I think it's really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what movies cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don't want to think about the money. I want to see the story.
Characters never live with me in film the way they do on stage, and they have certain ramifications that movies just never have.
I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
After I did 'Broadcast News' and got an Academy Award nomination, the first thing I did was 'Roe vs. Wade' at NBC.
'Saving Grace' was a full stretch-out - literally, physically, spiritually, psychologically. And I needed to take a year-and-a-half off when it was over.
I think that 'Saving Grace' is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.
I found acting when I was 14, when I got cast in the chorus in a high school play, 'The Boyfriend.' In my high school, we did mainly musicals, so I just started doing nothing but musicals for years and loved it.