As an actress, I never went to film school, and I think if I had gone to film school, I would have started with a great advantage. If you have a strong intent to do anything in life, you can do it, but it always helps to have formal training.
I've been working since I was 9, and I've never known a life without a film set.
Most of my life, I've been on a film set. There isn't anything to learn, not learn, unlearn. It's just in me.
I'm very good at getting up in the morning - so much of my life has been spent on film sets where we start at the crack of dawn.
I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.
I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?
I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.
When I left college, I though that I would be immediately embraced by the film world and instead found myself sitting in a squat for three years not knowing what to do with my life.
It's not good just to have life experience of film-making and that's all. It's hard to play a real person when you've been in jets and town cars for three years.
I used to enjoy the spotlight. If I had a day off from filming, I didn't know what to do. Now I enjoy my family time so much, there is this sense of, if it all went away, and I was just a mom, I would love my life.
Filming takes a lot out of you. It really does. It's immensely demanding, and you have to put the rest of your life in the icebox until you do your final shot.
Acting is always at the core of my life, but I'm also excited about producing. I'm excited about directing, and I have a life in the filmmaking world, and so I want to explore all aspects of it, not just the acting, but acting is the root.
My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.
My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.
Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.
People talk about balance. Balance is an awful measure of things because it implies a scale that inevitably tips. I like to look through the filter of, 'Is the life I'm leading consistent with my priorities?' For me, my family is the ultimate litmus test.
I am not a doctor or a scientist, but merely a passionate layperson, a filter, a messenger. I spoke with so many patients who are living normal, happy, fulfilled lives, and their enthusiasm and great quality of life convinced me that you can indeed live with cancer.
Over at Barb Bowman, she's arguing that we should turn off Facebook's tracking of ads. I totally disagree; those trackers make newsfeed filtering work better and potentially could help bring me better ads, which improves my life.
I got into the habit of filtering out all the good in my life, focusing on only the negative. I'm not sure why I did it, but it's a pretty depressing state.
I write about everything, but I just - how faith filters through all that and colors your opinion of other people and life and all that.
